This debut album by a producer and multi-instrumentalist from Izmir comes replete with an impressively elaborate self-description. It talks of “Phonetics themes”, using phonemes rather than words to tell stories, with digressions into “Nada Yoga” and the claim that the producer is “beholden to the harmoniousness of two essential properties that maintains the forcefulness of a cognition space.” Even after several readings, soundtracked by the aural results, it remains opaque what the actual links are between the theory and Praxis.
What we have here is a record that is consistently sophisticated, sometimes almost beautiful, but remarkably standard. The palette here — a collage of field recordings, laptop distortion, minimal instrumentation and subterranean hums — is remarkably familiar from any number of iBook creations released in the last decade or so. Praxis is a particular serene version of this idiom. The ideas seem to be confined to the jerky cut-ups of the opening “A Phonetics These”, whose spliced syllables evoke something between Stockhausen’s Stimmung and Goodiepal. After this, tracks are left to drift along prettily, in a by now predictable international laptop style.
The rather misnamed “Visceral (In A Figurative Sense)” for instance, elegantly features doleful organ chords, a punctuating synth, and some background clutter and scrape, as if to give the impression that the piece is far less structured than it is. “Behold Now Bikkus, The Sounds of Nada Yoga” promises something slightly more outré, with its chants hovering in the background — but there are no major departures.
Owen Hatherley