Billy Gomberg - Slight At That Contact LP

Label: Students Of Decay

Our Review:

Brooklyn's Billy Gomberg is an electronic musician who dials back to the clicks and cuts milieu that explored the poetics of a single systematic glitch that could end the world. The celebrated failure of Y2K to bring down civilization left at worst a shadow of paranoia and at best an ambivalence toward the technologies that infiltrate our collective mind, body and spirit. Many artists, Coil in particular, embraced these concepts in a teleological perversion. Gomberg finds himself in a similar cathedral of re-engineered sound, though he's more of an agnostic in worshiping the glitch. Slight At That Contact is a circumspect album that mopes and shuffles through digital slices and fractures of what may have started out as some spartan tribute to Chet Baker. The surfaces of pixilated polygons, lossy frequency artifacts and deliberately awkward juxtaposition allow for distorted glimpses into what may have once been. Gomberg's somber synthesis of the tonal quality of bass, clarinet, drum and even bird song have all been fabricated through the realm of the digital, but the existential ennui of these maudlin, overcast sounds carries through regardless.