Skip to main content[STYLE DRIFT] It's wonderfully apt that the first release to completely fit with local label Community Library's sensibilities—which are stylistically ungrounded, per dogma—is a rediscovered recording that completely flies in the face of sense: Project Perfect's PM+. In the span of 11 releases, Community Library has yet to redouble a genre, yet to touch anything remotely conventional. Free jazz, wired lounge, techno and noise all share in the label's love. And Project Perfect—the creation of ex-Fontanelle members Andy Brown and Charlie Smythe—proves the label's amorphous nature to be an ad infinitum sort of deal, bringing a sound as ungrounded as CL curators Paul Dickow and David Chandler could possibly hope for.
In Project Perfect's case, however, it's more accurate to say "resurrecting" a sound, as most of the duo's frenetic output was recorded and performed between 2002 and 2004—which, in Portland's volcanic experimental scene, is another era. The Red76 arts group originally released PM (the CL re-release includes new material, hence the "+"), but the record never found its way into distribution. PM was archived (thankfully), but its influence was a far cry from the relative renown of Fontanelle's Kranky Records-released material.
There is a glancing reflection of Fontanelle's beeps-and-boops backroom funk in Project Perfect's sound, however. But it is only a glance: Guitar wahs appear with a wink only to give way to what sounds like a fuzzed-out, muted jackhammer, which in turn gives way to a swarm of buzzing synth and guitar tones. The record moves through colors of sound like paint thinner, with little more than keys, guitar, drum machine and old twisted radio recordings. It maintains a palpable and constant mingling of rumbling drama (the album opens on hypnotic, chilly bass pulses), atmospheric lilt (PP loves a guitar delay) and transient plays at rhythm. Like labelmates Nudge, or again, Fontanelle, Project Perfect has more truck with heartbeats than clocks. And the end result—the seamless drift, the anti-gravity rhythm—is completely and horribly transfixing, nothing short of an ethereal narcotic.
Project Perfect plays with World, Light White, Smoke & Mirrors and DJ Brokenwindow Wednesday, Feb. 14, at Holocene. 9 pm. $6. 21+.
WWeek 2015