Review Summary: Nowhere anywhere
Liminal Space is about as cogent as IDM titles come. I feel IDM is often a limbo genre, insofar as it's a genre to begin with, giving form to ideas and sounds too warped or abstract to exist outside of specific electronic frameworks. We often think of music as a kind of shared language, capable of expressing complex emotions or atmospheres in a way almost anyone can understand intuitively, but I think it's more accurate to see it as a collection of languages, different styles rich with their own idioms that can be navigated and harnessed almost interchangeably to similar ends by a skillful practitioner. Among these, IDM sits as a limbo: although it's still contingent to the way we engage with and process all music, its affect is often less personal or emotional to begin with, and it's actively resistant to being translated into something any other style could articulate; you can play practically any song as, say, a folk or reggae number with the right adjustments, but what goes on in IDM by and large stays in IDM. It's lazy to pigeonhole artists in the style as being formless and dissociated, but it doesn't take much probing to see where that tendency comes from.
Anyway, I digress. The main deal here is that
Liminal Space brings to mind an abstract threshold space beyond being just another IDM album trapped in its own private pocket of coldness and calculation. Xanopticon's frenzied mechanical beats certainly evoke this, but the tone of his music is full of liminal evasiveness too, rich with an atmosphere of empty space that you'll easily pick up on but will struggle to articulate outside of adjectival vagueries. This owes much to his synthscapes, which play a critical role to shaping the tone here despite their minimal prominence, sparse as smoke pooling out of your speaker and into the corners of your listening environment. They offer an illusion of space that often dissipates more than it holds up, charting the expanse of Xanopticon's sound with a just-over-the-horizon intrigue in their suspenseful chord progressions, rendered uncanny by the formlessness with which he incorporates them. They drift and float and tease, and they're never fleshed out with a direction or progression that seems to lead anywhere.
If this is the basis for the arbitrary nowhere-ness of limbo, then the album's percussion feels like a violent creative fission that teases almost infinite possibilities without giving lasting form to any of them.
Liminal Space is driven by an ugly, glitching mass of beats that explode and dissipate and condense and scribble over one another, less a tangible rhythmic structure and more a dark cluster of aberrant polygons competing and reconfiguring one another into oblivion. Although they're by far the central part of these arrangements, they're also the hardest part to hold onto; they move too fast for casual concentration, yet the more attention you pay to their minutiae in real time, the more of the thrill the album is to follow.
This approach is hardly unprecedented, and it brings to mind a number of albums, most notably Venetian Snares'
Huge Chrome Cylinder Box Unfolding, which came out the following year and traded evasive atmospheres off against breakneck percussive warpings in a similar way. However, where that album was generous with its melodies and presented the twisted ebb and flow of its odd-meter beats somewhat digestibly,
Liminal Space is fiercer, colder and more frenetic, comparably rewarding in its strengths but perhaps less forgiving to those for whom abrasive glitch is tantamount to interchangeable noise. That's not to say that it's an entirely one-note album; it explores subtle variations of pacing and intensity within its beats ("chii"), goes all-out for the benefit of breaks devotees ("drunxpla"), offers more mild entry points to disoriented listeners ("indec") and occasionally spotlights its synth pads for a melodic change of pace ("symphwrak"). This will all be great news for those already engaged with the album, coming into view as tangible contours among its ever-splintering jagged edges, but since Xanopticon stays largely in the same gear and with the same arrangement configuration from start to finish, these variations may be inadequate for anyone uneasy about his style from the onset.
That's just the risk you run in limbo - there'd be no thrill in an album so dedicated to glitchy abstraction and atmospheric ambiguity if you weren't faced with the possibility of getting lost somewhere along the way, for better or worse.
Liminal Space is consistent to a fault in the way it charts out a otherworldly wasteland, though my main complaint would be that it never seeks to tie itself together as a complete Experience: while the opener "constant" provides a warm-up of sorts, the closer "capacitd" ends the album by abruptly dropping it off the map, as though Xanopticon's faculty for fission has finally burnt itself out and whatever private plane of reality he's sustained thus far must immediately cease to exist as a consequence. This is probably appropriate in many senses, but it still feels a tad unsatisfying given how immersive that sweet, sharp beat wildernesses can ultimately be.
It's worth it, though. As sensory barrages on the threshold of everywhere and nowhere go,
Liminal Space is gripping enough to pull off a bumpy ending. Xanopticon's mastery of aggressive glitch is too striking to overstay its welcome, and he does well to intermittently tease that he could have scrapped the beats entirely and made a respectable ambient record in their stead. You're in safe hands here, but still, it will do well to strap in tight.
