Review Summary: Go outside....... BITCH
Macintosh Plus is a staple for vaporwave. With their 2011 release Floral Shoppe, they basically created the internet-friendly incarnation of the genre, noting what Chuck Person's Eccojams achieved the year prior and taking it to the next level. While I don't particularly love that album like many others do, it was an important chapter for the genre. Now enter the Mac's newest outing, and it is their magnum opus. A glitchy throwback track to the early 2000s that simultaneously injects new and unheard futuristic grooves, taking from genres like footwork, dub, halftime and more. Let's delve a little deeper.
The song spans 12 minutes and has many sections throughout, unfolding as a kind of experimental sonic journey. The best part about this song is that it's so sonically dense and huge that the ears are immediately delighted with splashes of synth and kaleidoscopic sounds. They resonate through the brain with pulses of stutter-y delight. Candy-coated synths and wirbly recordings dominate the space as bizarre syncopated beats gurgle underneath. It is not unlike Machine Girl's Gemini; total auditory bliss at one end of its peak spectrum. It's exploring a literal place and dimension with these sounds. Some will appreciate that, absolutely relish every moment of it, and others will want it to sound like a hooky radio song and be let down. Sorry, homie Mac don't play like that. That cave has been explored already.
A user on YouTube described this album as an "A.I. trying to create music using only 90s samples and synths" and that is one of my favorite descriptions of this album so far. Nothing can be closer to the truth. This lead me draw the similarity between this and albums like this and a band like Autechre. Painstakingly cutting up electronic patterns and in-depth programming to create new sonic landscapes for people. It's a noble thing to do and you have to take your hate off for Macintosh Plus here. They do this and aren't trying to flip the script for no reason. Unlike most plunderphonics artists, who take from random sampling sources and often end up with post-modern goop, here Macintosh Plus aims for an aesthetic (no pun intended). And this style is markedly early 2000s, which works wonders for me, a person obsessed with plenty of atmospheric music from that time.
So go ahead and give this weird track a try. I did forget to mention that there is a vocal sample that gets squashed, stretched, and at points totally obliterated by distortion and effects throughout that repeats, "Go outside bitch". I think this is good advice coming from Macintosh Plus. We all spend a bit too much time online, and most assuredly being among the trees, birds and sky will enhance any music experience, guaranteed. So, as instructed, I went outside... listened to this single.... and gave it a 5. What will you do?
