I'm not going to come across like a know-it-all expert on that one. I'm sick to death of reading reviewers propping up their weak ideas with "facts about the artist" they read off a press release, or another website. I'm going to come clean here. I know nothing about Impulse Array. I had never heard of them before today. I can tell you they're from Lancaster, UK, but that's only b/c I read it on their bandcamp site. Could I do some research? Of course I could. But maybe let's for once just try to enjoy the music free of the context of where it sits in current music hype cycle (ir)relevance.
I'm not an expert on anything. I only know what I like, and what I don't like. I think music writers love to write about instrumental/ambient stuff because they can project anything they want to. I hear Burial as some dude frying bacon in cave. Mark Fisher hears a contemporary London-style post-apocalyptic negation of neoliberalism. Other music writers hear the sound of their bread being buttered, and well, there you go.
Impulse Array make electronic music that does more than one thing. In fact, I can count at least six different things that they do well. This is, in my (un)expert opinion, roughly five more good things than your typical electronic/ambient project. I'm tempted to throw all kinds of projections onto this canvas they've created: ideas of inner space travel, cosmic journeys, glowing capsules, etc. I'm going to resist this temptation for now. I heard about it here. You can go there and find other stuff that exists, more or less, outside the hype cycle. You can listen to the album on bandcamp and create your own projections. There's an infinity of takes to be had on an album of this breadth. For me to reduce it to anything would be a form of tyranny, maybe. My favorite track is Quasar Unknown because it's second section sounds like the crumbling of teeth.
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