Audiopile Review: Rashad Becker is probably best known as a vinyl mastering engineer. In this role, he’s occasionally achieved the technically impossible, cutting 20-plus-minute sides at 45rpm and whatnot. His evident scorn for the bounds of mere space and time is strongly evident on the two volumes of ‘Traditional Music of Notional Species’ he released via Pan in the mid 2010s. Becker’s notional species are presumably extra-terrestrial, given the unspeakably alien buzzing and whizzing tones that filled these two albums. At an appropriately inexplicable show he once played in a Vancouver DIY venue, Becker seemed to have all sorts of bespoke noise-making boxes, allowing him to produce sounds other MFs couldn’t even imagine. Becker has an extraordinary talent for producing utterly new sonics and sculpting them into disconcertingly beautiful music. The ‘Traditional Music…’ albums are among the best experimental releases of the 21st century and his new album, ‘The Incident’ is already a strong album-of-the-year contender for some of us. This is only Becker’s third album, so he clearly only says something if he has something important to say. And on ‘The Incident’, he says it with incredible confidence. There’s a greater emphasis on rhythm and structure here, making for a relatively accessible end-product. But we’d prefer to describe this as ‘compellingly strange’ rather than accessible as-such. ‘The Incident’ will take you waaay off world, but it’s more vivid and militant than anything you might associate with ‘space music’. Call it anti-space-and-time music, whatever that may be. Phenomenal.

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‘the incident’ is conceived as a sonic storyboard, a labyrinthine, narrative-driven ‘pseudo musical’ – using comical sonic touches and startling, idiosyncratic abstractions to reflect the era’s flustering absurdity.

divided into 4 chapters, the first part (‘let the record show’), ponders upon the end of the information age – as we stumble on to an age of corroboration and mutual witnessing…observe, acknowledge, transform, throw back – and reality getting replaced by its representation.

‘the currency of an urgent moment’ meanwhile, the album’s second act, observes this data deluge from four different vantage points, each with the same title in a different language.
reflecting upon how both language and place inform our understanding, each piece takes a radically different approach to the subject: dense, overpowering and dramatic, whimsical and delicate, ornate, charged and delirious – music as a model of transfer between exposure and experience.

the third act, ‘repercussions’, surrenders to a state of amplified apathy – as a ‘comical exorcism’

the final piece – ‘what really happened’ – sets the story straight with “a docu-fiction piece by the multitude” that details the whole string of events as musically true as possible to what -really- happened

the album is meant as a precursor to a series of works titled ‘based on a true story’ which further explore the concept of musical documentaries – under the premise that the invocation of ‘document’ has to be considered impossible – or at least fraudulent.

the record also marks the initial release on the label clunk.