Review Summary: To love sound again
Techdog is a twelve-hour-long canvas splatter of a singular human bean from Santa Cruz. It mixes glitch leaning IDM, drone, noise and pop into 77 songs spanning 7 albums released over 7 days. It is, by all accounts, a very silly holistic listening experience: excessive, ungainly, deliberately obtuse, seemingly unedited, and showcasing limited respect for your time or mine. It exists in opposition to you. This was for Patricia. This is Patricia. This is
Techdog.
For all of its shit-thrown-at-wall (plentifully and unapologetically) aesthetic, there’s a lot of careful structural cleverness at play here. The big picture trumps the little, the comp following a lightness > darkness > lightness redemptive arc, each four hour “part” shifting the tonal spirit level up-down-up. Fractal whimsy and nostalgia-core is Techdog one-through-four: that
Green Hill Zone chopped and screwed vibe, built up through hopeful hues and cookie dough and static. It’s cozy and reassuring, hypermelodic, suuuper warmmm, and fucking endless, seemingly, by virtue of adept atmospheric consistency - it all just
fits - as well as the track length gimmickry in play. Each
Techdog adds two-minutes to the tracks of the last, such that the 2-minute snippets of
Dog1 grow into 8-minute long jams by the time you get to
Dog4. When coupled with the sonic consistency - that singular globular palette, all bright and gleaming and flamboyant and probably hot pink - it lends a lovely narrative quality to the first four-album arc. The tunes are in dialogue with one another: melodies reoccurring, movements building, textures mutating, each
Techdog iterating on the last, fortifying the foundations, the vision coming together, shifting into focus, blooming, pulsing, exploding(!), in bliss,
forever. Via synth lines you can sing and snare sequences that you can’t, an effigy of Taxxon is conjured, one that, when set alight, reveals her creative avatar, the version of herself that lives in and through her music, goofy and gushing and beaming and vibrant and
everything.
And then it just stops.
Techdog 5 is genuinely unsettling. Joy canceled and ice cream confiscated, the experience lurches downward, bleaker, grayer, cute beeps and soft boops replaced by the eerie and the dark and the absence. You feel as if you’ve lost something, or someone, such is the personality of the opening album run.
Techdog 6 contorts the formula further, dark ambience disintegrating into harsh noise which, with the continued +2min Techdog rule in play, amounts to over two hours of convulsing aural gristle. It’s an abusive, patience-testing listen, one that’s (still) regularly rewarding by virtue of the sound design wizardry on display, yet clearly designed to fuck with you, toying with space, time, momentum and expectation, all at your expense.
What to do, then, for the final chapter, but perform one final volte-face? A four hour drone? A four hour drone.
Techdog 7 contains more silence than sound. The death dirge of the previous two LPs succumbs to literal nothingness. There’s space. That’s literally all there is. It is peace. It is also sad. The gloops and boops, the candy-coated frenzy, the charismatic magic of Techdog’s opening act, still alludes, hyper minimalism surplanting it, the void overriding the musical familiar from the flames that were. Spoiler alert: it all comes full circle, eventually, listener and glitchy pup finally reunited (thank
chris(t)) in the most over-the-top, cathartic and rewarding conclusion to any musical project I’ve experienced in years. Does it justify the 8 hours of relative turmoil that it takes to get there? Uh, no (lol) but, somehow, also, yes.
It’s the journey, the whiplash, the to-and-fro, all the genuine elation surprise confusion awe grief and relief, that makes it
it, the human experience, an ode to it, and to expression itself, the whole messy pointless essential cycle of creation, of clawing the spirit and soul out from within, desperately clinging to the essence of the self, ugly and imperfect, and hurling it at the canvas, stubbornly, repeatedly, again and again, to communicate something, anything, literally anything at all, via splatters and splutters, however flawed and fractured, and have it heard, actually heard, even if not understood, though hopefully, I hope, oh god I hope someone is listening.
