The word "organic" gets tossed around a hell of a lot in discussions of electronic music. I myself have even thrown it into a review or twenty, so I may as well take a stab at a definition, however awkward: I use "organic" to describe sound that seems derived from some kind of primordial logic or process that gives the illusion of falling outside the realm of human creation. It has something to do with structure, process and product being integrated in a way that the final piece seems whole and complete. When music is organic, I find myself contemplating the work as a singular entity instead of adding up the individual pieces.

Oval comes to mind when I imagine the ultimate in organic music. When I listen to Oval-- particularly his last three records-- the man behind the music disappears and I'm interfacing directly with the aggregate sound as a living thing in itself. I know Markus Popp had reasons for placing this crackle here and this glitch there (he is the designer, after all), but the logic of the micro seems unfathomable. Listening becomes a top-down process.

I mention the idea of the organic in the context of Richard Devine's Aleamapper because this music is the diametric opposite of the word. This album, which serves as a darker, dronier companion to this year's Lipswitch, is a thread of disconnected fragments streaming by endlessly, like metallic objects on an assembly line. The whole is invisible; all you can make out are the dead, inert chunks of material.

This is machine music divorced from the lifecycle, where the digitally derived sound sources are so clearly a product of powerful computers that if I close my eyes, I can almost see the scrolling window of Cubase in preview mode. But all this is not to say that the record is bad; in fact, the direct "man at the computer" vibe of Aleamapper makes good sense in the context of the overall mood. But I only want to listen to such music occasionally, in a very specific time and place.

For most of Aleamapper, Devine eschews the beats in favor of moody, rumbling ambient atmosphere. But there are a few moments of the frantic, cut-up funk that marked Lipswitch. Upbeat tracks like "Vecpr" and "Step Focus" are steeped in electro, but miles removed from the robotic party jams of Grandmaster Flash and the Egyptian Lover. Like the pioneers of Detroit techno, Richard Devine sees the cold and isolated heart of the cyborg, but unlike them, he never inverts the gloom with a dose of dancefloor transcendence. In fact, only the gorgeous bed-of-clouds drone of "Float 82" allows any sort of respite from the ugliness of Aleamapper.

The reference point that keeps coming to mind is Tokyo-based sound artist Christophe Charles, who released a compilation of his work on Mille Plateaux in 1997 called Undirected 1986-1996. Charles used field recordings as sources for his collages (he provided Markus Popp with recordings of bells for manipulation for Oval's Dok), and arranged them randomly using a computer program that can also be found on his CD (Mac only, dammit). Charles' use of chance operations gave Undirected an unpredictable feel that Aleamapper lacks, but both records contain long passages comprised of disorienting pieces of sound in relentless motion.

Devine has done a nice job putting it all together, and remember, he meant for the stitches to jut out like red, swollen welts. But still, there's something here that keeps me at arm's length, and I feel stationary and somewhat removed from the action as the sounds stream by. In any case, Aleamapper is a bleak tunnel of inorganic sound to be journeyed occasionally.

-Mark Richard-San, December 11th, 2001