What a title, eh? What kind of recorded music could possibly live up to it? The ambitions of this recording are not only hinted at in that grandiose title, but are further elaborated in a deeply pretentious sleeve note. “Aspires to a viral, everpresent omnipresence”, the writer solemnly informs us. “Autodigest arrived in the form of an encyclopaedia, an archeological sound document time-travelling out of a post-digital-meltdown landscape.” What in the name of Stephen Hawking does that mean?
Despite such off-putting pseudo-intellectual garbage, the music herein is really pretty good. Autodigest’s approach is simply to fragment everything he can get his hands on, and grind it into dust; through atomisation, he reaches into some new real of digital madness. Of the 12 tracks here, most are experiments in a series titled “Compression”. Only one is called an “Expansion”, a statistic which indicates he prefers the act of crushing to the act of building. Fear not however; it’s not a huge stitch-together patchwork from familiar musical sources, like John Oswald and his Plunderphonics. Rather, it’s mostly totally abstract digital noise. And what noise… vast cathedrals of nihilistic, oppressive din… nightmarish feelings are conveyed almost instantly. Events rush by at 100 mph, suggesting information overload squeezed down a narrow digital pipe… ghastly bass throbs, utterly unmusical, underpin everything in this crazy-house architecture, while liberal use of digital echo delineates enormous spaces. Good, massy and waighty sound art; delivered with dynamics which are often-times quite remarkable. I hate remix culture, but this goes beyond the rim of remixing and moves into another totally horrifying space.
I’m not inclined to find out any more about this guy. Printed credit simply read “Written and composed by everyone” but “Mixed, compressed and expanded by Autodigest”. It’s my guess that he’s trying to pack as much substance as he possible can into concentrated lumps of poisonous boiled sweets, like Spangles laced with arsenic. The internal mock-triptych image inside is particularly sardonic; there’s a priest at high mass, hands raised, about to consecrate the sacred host. But his eyes are hidden by a superimposed black shape wich contains a stained glass window. This image is flanked by two rag dolls, so scrappy that even Mike Kelley would reject them, more like something from primitive, rural witchcraft. In all, a fairly singular statement, startling, alarming and quite subversive in intent; it drives another nail into the coffin of Western civilization.
Ed Pinsent