Oswald Berthold’s work in Farmers Manual just couldn’t satisfy his itch of the deeply weird. Here you’re given stuff so absolutely bizarre that the album is copy and pasted spam nonsense and the music doesn’t help you understand anything. Indeed, it is as if his computer was trying to say something before it died.
This is pure digital manufactures. At no point are you reminded of anything approximately a beat or melody. Rather the music floats freely around your ears, referencing nothing but the broken math equations that made it possible.
Rhythms form occasionally, in an attempt to make sense of the chaos. In the third track a beat and rhythm begins to form out of random noise. Slowly but surely, structure reasserts itself. Even the structure is attacked by all sides.
What’s interesting is the gradual decrease of loud (like the opening track which is nothing but barely treated static noise) into almost hypnotic and near silent “meta” suites which close out the disc. It sounds like the computer freaked out in the beginning only to be talked down from that level of insanity.
Clearly there is something larger going on in here. Prix Ars Electronica stated: "Here was a jutting mass of digitized disturbance that fueled our direct reckoning with destabilized mathematics. (...) Spam data malformations. Direct waveform bitstream. Seizure. Disengage. Smitten." I couldn’t have said it better myself. They gave it an honorable mention.
Really, this isn’t something you’d want to delve into every day. But with the right mood and proper digital fetish, this hits the spot. There’s something oddly engaging in such random sequences that makes me happy whenever I listen to it.