Ben Fleury-Steiner - Polygon Universe

Ben Fleury-Steiner's worn many a stylistic hat over the years, assuming the complexities of the drone throne on early solo works for labels such as Infraction, Umbra, Dark Duck, and his own (late) Gears of Sand imprint. But "Polygon Universe" finds the intrepid sound explorer doing a 360 and fully immersing himself in the realm of contemporary beat-science. Expertly drawing from the deep wells of IDM canon, the more fluid strands of dubstep, laptop culture's hyper-dense sound design, and the sort of rhythm programming that at times can whip the ghosts of Photek, Monolake, and Richard H. Kirk into a frenzy, BFS brings together the last two decades of such musics into a cumulative meteor-storm of audacious pulse. The disc sounds like everything that's come before and nothing like it at all; you can catch fleeting wisps of early Aphex, of late 90s British bass-ic instincts, but ultimately BFS has done something unique here. *This* is the modern face of beatstuff as refracted through the prism of electronica sub-genres both established and yet-to-be-coined. As the disc moves through its nine chapters of mesmeric thrust, expertly crafted, sequenced, and mastered, it engulfs you in the kind of aural dynamics that'll test the limits of any nuanced soundsystem—and your ears, to boot. The final track, with its hypnotic wellspring of triangulated synthetics, is spellbinding, one of the best of its type to woo your sensibilities in, frankly, years.