Audiopile Review: A key figure in the US experimental underground, Alex Cobb issued dozens of titles during the mid 00’s under his Taiga Remains moniker, though his work running the Students of Decay label for the past two decades is likely how most would have crossed his paths. While the imprint hasn’t kept up the intense pace it once had, the thoughtful and prescient curation of SOD has marked the label as one of thee notable experimental imprints of the 21st century. Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Sarah Davachi, Natural Snow Buildings and even Vancouver’s own Secret Pyramid are just a few of the artists that Cobb has given an early platform to. While SOD has quieted down in recent years, Cobb has shifted focus over to his Soda Gong label, which has dealt LPs spiritually connected to the “post-dance” aesthetic that has swelled up around the West Mineral/Huerco S/etc multiverse. And though his Taiga Remains project was long ago retired alongside several other monikers, Cobb is still active, recently adopting the Etelin moniker, with his debut release under this newer name launching his Soda Gong imprint a half decade back. His Taiga Remains project explored drone, ambient and noise-adjacent textural work, though Etelin is firmly planted in the new wave of glitch-ambient that draws heavy inspiration from the first wave of artists that labels like Mille Plateaux and Raster-Noton championed. Patio User Manual weaves smeared static tones and glistening washes of synths with snippets of field recordings, overlapping these light pulsations with bird songs and the warped sounds pulled from his Midwestern patio. He strikes a healthy balance between the gooshier Jan Jelinek side of glitch and the skipping tonal bombardment of the Clicks & Cuts crowd, coming somewhere close to the transcendent environmental ambience of Roméo Poirier’s recent output. It’s an immersive listen that collapses the real into the synthetic with each orb-like vignette. Cobb’s solo release schedule has slowed considerably, though we’re the beneficiaries of this careful and considered output. Highly recommended.

On his third album as Etelin, Alex Cobb explores the intricacies of separation and belonging using field recordings and electronics, reconfiguring the dividing line between what is artificial and natural in the process. Maintaining a sense of playful reverence and lurking melancholy in its glitchy pastoralism, Patio User Manual hums with a meticulous and singular energy. From the loops and static pulses of “The Chemistry of Cobalt” to the tension and release of “Electrical Sailing,” the listener is pulled into a sound world at once ambivalent and radiant, reaching its denouement in the lovely melody that closes the final track, “Picnic at Gas Station Park.” Although the album might bring to mind the nuanced and imaginative ambient music published by labels such as Mille Plateaux, Sonig, and Silent Records in the 1990s, it is, in the end, a world of its own and very much of today. The patio as a stage for alienated life, pyrrhic in its isolation, deceptive in its promise of distinction. Orientation as disorientation, often unseen inside the frame but felt in the bones. What is out there, anyway, other than the thing we fear the most? Written, recorded, and mixed by Alex Cobb, 2022-2023. Mastered by Guiseppe Ielasi. Design by Keith Freund and Alex McCullough.