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Reviews

Robert Logan — Brutalist
(Slowfoot no#, 2025, DL)

by Peter Thelen, Published 2025-01-23

Brutalist Cover art

Mostly what we have reviewed by Robert Logan here at Exposé are his ambient works as Firehand and his collaborations with Steve Roach; Brutalist takes in pretty much a new area of his multifaceted musical interests, and perhaps he has done something like this before — we only know what we have heard so far, but to date there hasn’t been one quite like this. Granted, he’s still working with elements of noise and other abstract sonic  elements, but the mood tends to fall on the uneasy side, mostly a bit chaotic and chattery, without a lot of cadence, definitely leaning toward the explorative, yet still within the reach of dub techno, ambient, minimalist, and electroacoustic experimentation, even a bit of colorful melodicism at times. Let it be known that Brutalist is a long album, 24 tracks stretching out well beyond the two hour mark, written and recorded over a thirteen year period, with no two cuts sounding the same, but strangely related. Logan pretty much produced everything himself, with a little help on guitar and trumpet on a couple tracks; the rest seems to be created on synthesizers and software instruments, with some sound sampling and a lot of mysterious turns and twists, percussive elements, and more. The title, Brutalist, refers to an architectural style known as Brutalism — a style that emerged in the aftermath of World War II — stark, raw, but in a strange way very beautiful, like the concrete bunker on the album’s front cover. This is the point in most reviews where I veer off and start citing and describing individual tracks, but in this case one might do well to jump to the Bandcamp page and give it a listen for yourself, because none of the cuts here would be easy to describe. I certainly dig the percussive elements in “Black Mamba,” and the funky bottom end; “The Dead Hand” ticks away like a trigger clock in the shadow of the moon capturing a strong element of fear; one could question and speculate how many of the sounds on “Rust Morphology” were created, which midway through jumps into an odd caricature almost like some forgotten tune by The Residents; among the more melodic pieces is “Covered in Eyes” with its pulsating rhythms and lofty soaring majestic sprites. Wherever you drop the needle (so to speak — this is a download only, though its length would just fit on two CDs) you‘re going to find some very unusual pieces that completely defy convention.


Filed under: New releases, 2025 releases

Related artist(s): Robert Logan / Firehand

More info
http://robertlogan1.bandcamp.com/album/brutalist

 

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