Review Summary: Disassemble.
In layman’s terms, animism involves believing animals, plants, and various other worldly elements are capable of having souls. How this idea permeates electronic producer Lee Evans’ newest album,
Animist Pools, is strange in that it’s never really explored, but observed - considered, but never really resolved. Under the Hippies Wearing Muzzles moniker, Evans uses a menagerie of modular synths, layering them like a mechanized nature preserve (or, a “fecund biosphere” as music news resource THUMP aptly described the title track). It’s as though every plant is perfectly symmetrical, growing like a kaleidoscope, while various insects are composed of tiny little gears and circuits. It’s all very crisp and percussive, with little in the way of actual fluid ambience; most songs consist of several isolated synths that coexist without bleeding into one another. Initially, everything runs like clockwork.
It’s not fair to say
Animist Pools is uneventful, given how busy it sounds at nearly any given moment. Still, it seems to be composed of a series of self-contained ecosystems that spring up at the flick of a switch, then fade similarly without going anywhere in particular. There’s almost a constructed naivety to Evans’ soundscapes, as though he’s building a digitized environment so lifelike, he wants to discover the fine line where he should feel guilty for routinely wiping it out. This is probably unnecessarily morbid when considering what is otherwise a very bright, therapeutic listening experience, but, hey, it’s a thought. Occasionally, little glitches in the matrix come to surface. The first two tracks, “Kakapo Strigops” and “Romulan Strain Phase”, are airtight, and resemble future-calypso instrumentals. “Tangerine Cell Pattern” embraces a more authentically unpredictable route, and creaks and groans with the pangs of existence amidst the cheerier noises.
Possibly the most significant moment on
Animist Pools is the beginning of closer “Aharonov - Bohm System”, where the synths are stripped away, revealing a more barren surface that teems like a natural pond, rather than an unnatural jungle. It’s as though Evans left the system alone for the weekend, then returned to find it self-sustaining on the basis of something unforeseen and baffling. It’s similar to Johnny 5 from the film
Short Circuit (in which a U.S. military robot gets an electrical surge via lightning and is then determined to have an actual humanness). The most interesting part of that movie is how it interprets “free will”, which, some theorists have argued, is non-existent, claiming every activity of our brain can be compartmentalized into something more biochemical, and all we can do is observe our own programming as it plays out. This is probably beyond the intended scope of
Animist Pools, but it grants a sense of tragedy to what is an album of growth, with little mechanical beings that continuously struggle against their own programming in order to achieve life.
