Intersystems – IV LP
Suction RecordsLabel Description:
Toronto’s infamous psychedelic multimedia collective, Intersystems, make a surprise return with a new full-length LP, #IV, their first new material since 1968! Intersystems’ pioneering avant/electronic music sounded positively alien in the 1960s, and more than 50 years later, this latest body of work sounds just as otherworldly. With original poet/lyricist Blake Parker now deceased, current members Micheal Hayden and John Mills-Cockell (of Syrinx) made the counterintuitive (yet strangely apt) decision to render Parker’s words electronically. As the computer-synthesized voice alternates between an eerily life-like delivery and slurred cybernetic faltering, it brings a new dystopian tint to the group’s anxious surrealism. A modular Moog Synthesizer system is the primary instrument, offering a dynamic blend of different sonorities: barbed wire basslines, Subotnickesque chirping, gestural plumes of colour and percussive filigree.