After many years and many amazing releases, Francesco De Gallo — the Montreal-based artist behind Hobo Cubes and the Hobo Cult cassette imprint — has finally dropped a full-length vinyl platter. An epic song cycle rife with complex textures and fractal-like beat patterns, Apex Ideals is De Gallo's most ambitious and most fulfilling project to date. Each side of this lovingly curated album plays out like an extended mental transmission, with individual thoughts escaping into the atmosphere in radiating waves, dotted with microscopic fragments of glitch.
Oblique beats and frayed electronics, such as on album opener "Structures in Stasis," completely shred any notion that this record is going to be a relaxing ride; De Gallo commands the listener's attention, with even the drone fields arriving littered with adventurous bits of sound. Hints of cyborg dub seep through in pieces like the jittery "Fluidity" and the ultra-dark "Unit," while De Gallo channels a damaged Angelo Badalamenti on "What Seemed to be Nothing," which closes out the proceedings. Apex Ideals really ups the ante with respect to De Gallo's vast body of recorded sound, with the true apex hopefully a long way off in the distance.
(Debacle)Oblique beats and frayed electronics, such as on album opener "Structures in Stasis," completely shred any notion that this record is going to be a relaxing ride; De Gallo commands the listener's attention, with even the drone fields arriving littered with adventurous bits of sound. Hints of cyborg dub seep through in pieces like the jittery "Fluidity" and the ultra-dark "Unit," while De Gallo channels a damaged Angelo Badalamenti on "What Seemed to be Nothing," which closes out the proceedings. Apex Ideals really ups the ante with respect to De Gallo's vast body of recorded sound, with the true apex hopefully a long way off in the distance.