Arpanet – Inertial Frame

Like all the Arpanet vinyls released by Record Makers, this one is just as well pressed as the others, with a dynamic pressing and no background noise (after the discs have been washed, of course).

One of my all time fav record and the one i listened the most (more than 1000 times i'm sure). The mastering of this LP is not as good as CD version.

Amusing this, the listener feeling hurt about this aspect of the creation tainting one's entirely subjective experience of the album as a whole. I too used to be extremely hung up on the notion of a "classic" album and the quest for a song cycle of utter perfection in its flow from start to end, practising a beard-stroking appreciation of album dynamics and, yes, on rare occasions, the devoutly awe-struck weeping one will do when those alien pods hatch in the perfect sequence and the creatures stretch their nascent limbs for the first time in the record-monk's egg chamber.
But i have to say i have come to disagree, for the following reasons. 1. Those days are over. There may have been a heyday during which the cultural formatting of the creative process created a situation where artists might grab the necessary studio time to do one 'cycle' at a time, the intent being to tailor down to those talismanic 35 to 40 minutes end product for a record. But cd durations confused the issue and nowadays, the simple fact that every artist, either successful or self-proclaimed, has hours and, most probably, solid weeks of recorded sound contained in the data on a hard disk. In this profusion of creative output and archivage, the question of any definitive version, of anything at all, however subjective, has become mathematically obliterated and irrelevant.
2. This artist in particular has produced such vast quantities of class-A, stone-killer music on record and cd, and we can hardly begin to imagine the terrifying iceberg of unpublished stuff. Before so much sweat and yield, it is simply not acceptable to be whining from one's armchair that some particular aspect of a couple of tracks harshed your buzz.
3. The vocal on Event Horizon is not willy-nilly repetition of scientific phrases. "Particles draw near, and disappear" is fearsome and slammin' lyrics, boss, despite the affected delivery and the strange mirth that one may indeed feel.

A lot of great material here, some of my favourite Arpanet tracks. I find myself able to push past some of the awkward vocals but Event Horizon feels pretty much unforgivable to me. All of the vocals seem to have a quality that would fit better in satirizing this kind of music rather than enriching it. If the music were shallow or cliche, poking fun at it would be entertaining. Instead the music is esoteric and evocative and the vocals just seem to shit all over it. Furthermore, the song titles hold far more weight when the only link is through the feeling of the music; the scientific concepts are intriguing but lose all sense of wonder when the vocals spew them out willy nilly. Anyway, just needed to get this off my chest as I actually really love this album and feel kinda hurt every time these lyrics interrupt the experience.

Will always remain at the very heights of the most rabies music ever created.

This one breaks the 4th Dimension, in that sense that it's more than "music" - i know it's a far stretch saying that, but once you hear it with your mind at peace you will know what i mean. Greetings to that kind of mind who assembled this.

Are those deadpan (if heavily effected) vocals meant to be as hilarious as I find them, sometimes? Simultaneously yes and no - maybe. They're in keeping with the intriguing ambivalence of this LP, overall; including factually correct lyrics about quantum theory. , quantum theory also ambiguously flirts with fiction (e.g., 'Großvater Paradoxon' is the connundrum: 'what if you went back in time and killed your grandfather?') Marry this conceptual atmosphere with strictly digital instrumentation that plays unmistakably 80's-sounding arrangements and Inertial Frame strikes the right balance - in many dimensions.

The third Arpanet release is a clear mixture of the last two albums under this alias. Inertial Frame features the more musical qualities of the Wireless Internet album (including vocals (however warped they get on this album) and varying rhythms), and crosses them over to the scientific sound of Quantum Transposition. The new release is again, another concept album, this time about the physics of space.
For me, this is a very good album. Yes, of course some of it is a little cheesy, but isn't all electro this way? This is maybe the beauty of it! Great stuff to listen to before any important physics exams.