Phantom Acid by Jung An Tagen & Eric Frye

DIGITAL :: https://superpang.bandcamp.com/album/phantom-acid

With "Phantom Acid", Jung/Frye presents a series of 24 tracks, all 1:30 in length, laid out in enumerative fashion. This sets the tone for the record – it is confident in its form and structure; it is unrelenting; it is, to an extent, post-human. This is a familiar formula for Jung/Frye, the collaboration between artists Jung An Tagen and Eric Frye. Emerging from "Pulsar Acid", "Phantom Acid'' is the natural extension of their previous collaboration, expanding on ideas, concepts and musical structures that have been germinating for some time now.

Packaged within a tight and focused bundle that blends musical artefacts from the two, we hear echoes of shrouded voices from "Gremlin Net 2005" and "Diffusion Soliloquies" superimposed with the aleatoric and stochastic synthesizers of Jung’s work. Critically, the aesthetic of "Phantom Acid '' is one that neither artist can concoct alone – it emerges only through the entangling of their musical languages.

Borrowing from club-culture and techno, the sound of "Phantom Acid" is oscillatory and magnetic, melding cerebral academic composition and playful substrates of underground club culture. Machine-generated voices are segmented and decimated to incoherent grains, tugging on threads from Diana Deutsch’s “Phantom Words”: “We therefore often mishear words and phrases, and are subject to compelling illusions”

These form a consistent and unrelenting strand throughout the work that is tessellated with freely generated textures from Marcin Pietruszewski's nuPG. The intermingling of these two spirits is hypnotic and mesmeric – each track evolves a refined set, through montage and cuts. Snippets of sound are spread out across time, given a life beyond their atomic existence, and at times it is psychoacoustically violent.

A work best consumed in a single, uninterrupted sitting: one should try to lose themself in the unwavering character of this work.

– James Bradbury

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