After a four-year hiatus from music-making, Sacramento-based artist and composer Joe Colley is back with more of his caustic brand of sonic swashbuckling.
Colley's work can be classified as noise, but his highly ornamented compositions are far from the sadistic, ear-demolishing carpets of sound purveyed by the noiseniks of decades past. Armed with ancient electronic utensils, the artist explores a sort of lonely existentialism, dolefully framing the absurdity of life between carefully placed textured fields of drone, arrays of clatter and shards of radio static.
The act of experiencing No Way In is ironically fulfilling. One can become lost in the depths of these synthetic collages, imagining a colony of insect-like creatures chattering among themselves or a succession of chain mail-clad fists gingerly caressing a piece of rusty duct-work. Each side of this gorgeously decorated LP can be decoded as a universe unto itself, the primordial stirrings of a complex organism springing into being. It is a creation certainly worth the focused exploration it implores.
(Glistening Examples)Colley's work can be classified as noise, but his highly ornamented compositions are far from the sadistic, ear-demolishing carpets of sound purveyed by the noiseniks of decades past. Armed with ancient electronic utensils, the artist explores a sort of lonely existentialism, dolefully framing the absurdity of life between carefully placed textured fields of drone, arrays of clatter and shards of radio static.
The act of experiencing No Way In is ironically fulfilling. One can become lost in the depths of these synthetic collages, imagining a colony of insect-like creatures chattering among themselves or a succession of chain mail-clad fists gingerly caressing a piece of rusty duct-work. Each side of this gorgeously decorated LP can be decoded as a universe unto itself, the primordial stirrings of a complex organism springing into being. It is a creation certainly worth the focused exploration it implores.