Who doesn’t love a good synth pad? Even in the midst of electronica’s rising popularity, the more elegant sound effects of the earliest video games aren’t employed enough; it’s astounding what millenial production can do for what was already done twenty years ago. The skeletal formula is as follows: remastery + ProTools + youthful approach + Northern Europe + Saturn-centric thinking = average electronic album. But it’s perfectly acceptable to come from Chicago, like Nathan Koch, the man behind Emulsion, (and a good number of the artists featured on the this year’s brilliant compilation Idol Tryouts Two.) Koch’s Blue Sky Objective is a highly successful experiment, full of serious and quirky panpipes, far-reaching planetary bleeps and howls, sonar pulses and alien yawns, epic organ harmonies, moon boot plods, and his spaceship’s gritty spits, splutters, and scratches (commonly referred to as drums and their programmed cousins.)
That handful of emotive sound effects, inseparable from most people’s aural understanding of the universe, remains a part of the album from start to finish, to the degree that each song blends into the next like brief legs in a NASA mission. But with Earthbound titles like “Smeared Bus Window” and “King of 1998,” we’re forced to understand the music’s role as transpositions of thoughts on very mundane (read: mortal, time-sensitive) concerns like “Balloons And Centipedes.” Their creator is very much an Earthling, though he may confess to being an avid member of the San Francisco gaming scene before he started interpreting those background noises to the fullest extent of the law.
Emulsion’s debut is very much a glossily produced, neatly packaged, but nonetheless liberated set of songs. The tone of each is steadfastly echoic, bittersweet, and delicate, and the medium remains the same; Koch employs a set of tools, puts them to work in a boundless atmosphere, and only ties down visual and aural concepts by giving each song an everyday, user-friendly, if synthetic title, like “All Robots On Sale!”
It was personally impossible for me to empathize with Koch’s vision and interpretation, but impossible not to be affected by the results. The synthetic violins and bass countermelody on title track “Blue Sky Objective” is steeped in an ‘80s musical sensibility, but the flawless sound, modern innovations, and voice sampling are recognizably of the moment. And while in this particular moment there are a thousand Powerbooks being ordered about by the endlessly resourceful instruments attached to them, Emulsion’s has managed to surpass Laptop USA’s national average.