James Ferraro - Far Side Virtual

Author

Christian Scharp

Published

Friday 6th January

Hippos In Tanks

Voted as the album of the year by music snob institution The Wire (the long running UK publication, not the West’s frothy tome), Far Side Virtual is the latest in a steady stream of material from James Ferraro – ex-member of lo-fi electronic outfit the Skaters, and the first to favour the shiny digitalism of the current age over the dusty analog electronics of the hypnagogic heyday of the 80s.

What’s immediately apparent on this album is just how shiny the music is – compared to Ferraro’s previous output both as part of the Skaters and under his own name, his compositions take on a freshness and sheen that may seem confronting at first. But looking past the cheesy midi-synths and laptop polish there’s an incredibly beautiful album here – and one that cascades with melody. There are no long, drawn-out drones, no cyclical neo-psych jams – instead we’re plunged headlong into a Blade Runner-esque musical landscape of synthetic strings, garage band orchestral arrangements and chugging motoric rhythms.

The track names are the first giveaway of this album’s thematic preoccupations – titles like ‘Global Lunch’, ‘Pixarnia and the Future of Norman Rockwell’ and ‘Palm Trees, Wi-Fi and Dream Sushi’ summon up a utopia/cornucopia of shiny consumer electronics and virtual digital interfaces, and they’re matched sonically by a burbling, churning wonderland of sound. Even the squawking, chirping and at times thoroughly obnoxiously pitched synth melodies that leap over one another like salmon swimming upstream jar at first. But resist the temptation to turn it down, relax your wincing facial muscles and you’ll be rewarded with a musical experience as fast-paced as a bullet train and as technicolour as the iPad scribblings of a kid with ADHD.

It all sounds like it shouldn’t work, but only someone as effortlessly ballsy as Ferraro could take the uncoolest of contemporary musical gagetry and build an entire (and extremely beautiful) album out of it. Arguably the reason the Wire decided on the top spot for this album on its end of year poll was because it is, aside from everything else, an incredibly accurate depiction of the contemporary cultural zeitgeist. The snippets of start-up themes, instant message alerts and text to speech dialogue are perhaps the most obvious elements of the album’s preoccupation with the contemporary world and the media-saturated, hyper-information overload with which we live our lives. Far Side Virtual is so “now” it’s almost painful – but it’s a brilliant sonic sketch of the contemporary first world human experience, and for that it should be commended.