Zero Call “Fears And Dreams Of Living Machines” Album Review
JST Records released the first of it’s catalog for Zero Call on October 29th, 2018. Italian composer Andrea P. is an electronic musician and live musical artist. The latter is significant to note as, many within the Synthwave/Retrowave, Cyberpunk, Electronica genre never take the music away from the comfort of their digital workstations.
When asked where he draws inspiration from, “Zero Call was born from the need to communicate, through Electronic music, the social contradictions of the past and anxieties (with the new album) of the new century”, says Andrea P. While this is artistically vague and filled with creative type word salad speech, Andrea P. further elaborates…
In 2018 capitalism is about to be replaced by the greatest disruption of all time. Soon 10 billion humans will all live in mid-low class and make slaves of technology. The Living Machines will serve man from birth to be able to map every possible value: health status, tendencies, resistances, intelligence or not, tolerance to frustration or orders.
The largest corporations will use this data to understand what stimulus to give and who; who to cure and who to not. To do this they use the most advanced technologies, artificial intelligence and hardware of unimaginable performance, to implement the most massive and monstrous mass control project in history. ©JST Records, 2018
Fears And Dreams Of Living Machines
FADOLM fits nicely into the modern synthwave scene. On a side note, JST Records has artists of higher caliber on its roster. Zero Call is one them. Whereas, some record labels will produce and release anything (or anyone who pays to play) JST has a higher integrity standard when gauging the caliber of their artists. Again, I would consider Zero Call one of the assets and the music that Andrea P. is composing/producing definitely is worthy of listening to and purchasing.
The album is comprised of ten tracks. Nine of these ten, I get a kick out of and one which almost always triggers me to immediately skip it. (More on that later) The album has a wonderful flow and consistency throughout that lends its support the “concept album” feel. While the cyber-punk “tech slaves” motif in the genre is becoming somewhat stale IMO, it could also be a reflection of the reality of it in modern society. For example, I’m getting ads populated on my Instagram for fully automated security robots. What was once a cruel plot for D-grade movies (Chopping Mall) or a flashpoint for “Skynet becoming self aware” remarks, is genuinely becoming a reality. It’s hard not to conjure images of Bladerunner (Vangelis in the original movie and Hans Zimmer in the sequel) when listening FADOLM.
Lack of vocal imagination
One of my biggest gripes about FADOLM is the lack of inspiration when it comes to the vocals. Synthwave can stand on its own legs as instrumental music, but the addition of vocal melodies does bring a fresh flavor to the aural palette or sink the record outright. For most of FADOLM, the vocals add to the mix and benefit the listener’s experience. However, remember that track I always skip? This is the reason why.
Track three, “Living Machines” incorporates repetition in the vocal line that kills the song for me. After hearing a “It doesn’t matter really matter where you are” with no changes to pitch or inflection repeated over and over, I find myself saying, “Couldn’t you have tried a little harder on this?” The opening to Living Machines uses the same type of repetition among the instruments (as does the album and the genre for that matter), but this lack of vocal imagination is where I draw the line. A quick glance at the playlist count for FADOLM tells the whole story. Later in the album on Track #9, Tech Addiction is guilty of the same flaw. Even incorporating vocoder in the vocal line, “We know you’ll be satisfied,” it quickly dulls the ear and prompts me to lose attention.
In a stark contrast to tracks 3 and 9, track five, “Faster” utilizes an overdubbed speech clip. I’m not sure who the public speaker is, but his voice has such power, natural inflection and unique phrases that it immediately jumps out at me. In some ways, despite not having a definable melodic curve, it seems more musical than the repeated phrases previously mentioned. I’m guessing what the speaker will say next, and how he will say it. I would like to hear vocal lines inspired by this imperfect, human, organic vocal qualities in upcoming Zero Call works.
Minimalist but not predictable
I appreciate the oft subdued elements of this record. Whereas some synthwave albums of less skilled composers beat the listener over the head with cliché after cliché, FADOLM takes a more subtle approach. There are massive soundscapes of sustained, gorgeous keyboard pads and timbral waves of electronic ecstasy. These are the kind of planetarium wet dreams, where my ear (and soul) is happy to come along for the ride, and imagine I’m traveling across a barren, yet romantic wasteland of an android filled future. Zero Call is a master at combing all multitudes of sonic layers together, that you can’t hear all of them on the first, second or even fifth listening. Each new listening brings out some iota of understated morsel of electronic goodness.
Even though many of the musical phrases are symmetrical and chord progressions are decidedly diatonic, there is enough variety to keep me engaged through the entire album. One of the signs that I notice among composers of the genre is that, their initial forays into Synthwave is marked by “playing it safe”. I have strong hunch that as Zero Call continues to develop his own unique sound and craft he is going to make daring and experimental choices in his music. I look forward to this and seeing what surprises he can conjure up on his future albums.
Zero Call:
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/zerocall
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/zerocallband
Bandcamp: https://zerocall.bandcamp.com
Spotify: http://bit.ly/spotify-zerocall
