W-X, “W-X”

W-X
W-X
CASTLE FACE
6/10

Tim Presley has already made one hell of a fractured pop record this year with DRINKS, the collaborative effort between himself and Cate Le Bon. While that album is all wordplay and psychedelic pranksterism, W-X is another beast—one with more cosmic aims. Broken beats (not the genre, but the actual sound of beats that have fallen apart) are mixed with droning, lo-fi knuckle-draggers like “Steer Clear.” Then it’s back into synth squalls and the sound of ’70s Italian crime soundtracks being exsanguinated and then built back into functional pieces. In one case (“Restless Leg”), an entire psychic meltdown is built out of the scraps of Art of Noise’s “Beat Box.”  But these are more than just fragments—these are bits of melody and wormholes of sound that belie their length and, taken as an end-to-end listen (like you’re going to listen to the sole two-second song on here out of context), W-X provides plenty of fodder for hungry minds looking to go deeper into rarefied zones.