Books On Tape - The Business End

Genre IDM Publisher Greyday Productions External Links Official Site Greyday Productions

The Business End is LA-based artist Todd Matthew Drootin's third recording under the Books On Tape name, following 2003's Sings The Blues. Before that came 2002's Throw Down Your Laptops, which took a page from Matthew Herbert's playbook in its adherence to a self-imposed aesthetic. In this case, it was recording live to analog tape and foregoing any editing. Books On Tape is less groove-oriented than Herbert; it's been called "beat punk" for its open-ended mishmash of found sounds, samples, synthesizers, and programmed beats play around with the 4 to the floor beat and hooks of most dance music. What the difference is between beat punk and IDM, I'm not so clear on.

On The Business End, dance music's hooks have been shattered and scattered, like slivers of broken glass in your living room rug from that time you got trashed and dropped the bottle. And like bits of glass, it takes work to find them; for a while I discovered a couple more each time I listened. On most tracks they're not immediately accessible, but they lurk among the noises of this album. There aren't more than a smattering of them, throughout the whole album, however. The melodies here share something with IDM melodies, but they're not poignant and nostalgic like, say, Boards of Canada. They often appear in the guise of cheaply synthesized wind instruments, the kind you might find on a cheap Casio keyboard. There's the pseudo-sax that bounces around opener "The Truth, The Whole Truth, & An Assortment Of Lies" like a demented, distorted version of the octave jumps from Usher's "Yeah!," and the sorta-trumpet, sorta wah-wah pedal riff of "Patron Saints III." Mostly the tracks consist of these sorts of sampled or synthesized riffs swimming over fairly generic programmed drum tracks and ominous punk-twangy bass-lines.

Like a glaring shard of glass you can't miss, "People That Don't Like Me/People I Don't Like" stands out right away. Its main riff, done using what sounds like a goofy woodwind synth patch, lurches and slurs around the skittery drum programming typical of the album; it's the drunken hick cousin of Vitalic's "Wood." But the track also clues the listener in to a spirit of whimsy and humor that enjoys fiddling knobs and pressing buttons to create and order these sounds. It's a different kind of humor from, say, Kid606, not so much hey-Ma-look-what-I'm-doing as, hey, this is fun, this is pretty cool, check this out. This is process music, maybe; a safe bet is that Drootin goes crazy performing live, doing his best to act the opposite of staid screengazers. But live music is usually best enjoyed live. With only the record, is that enough?

Closing track "What Satan Said To Me" contains a great hook, but it appears only for about ten seconds near the end. On subsequent listens, however, the hook appears earlier in severely curtailed form--just a tease, really, through the repetition of one chord, which pokes its head up now and then during the first 4/5 of the song from underneath ravey synth stabs and stuttering samples. Waiting for the full hook becomes maddening once you know what's coming. This creates a tension that is almost, but not quite, satisfied when the full hook emerges finally for its brief moment of full-blown glory. But that's not all: go through the album again, and the hook is hinted at in other tracks.

Eventually the last piece of broken glass is found and disposed of. The hooks on The Business End run out and what's left are some neato found sounds and generic drum programming. The recurring samples and loops of the nine tracks are sometimes interesting in and of themselves, but most often not, and they have more difficulty catching hold than those slivers of hooks. I put in the time to find at least enough of the slivers that I can walk around barefoot, but Drootin hasn't made it that easy unless you know what to look for. Putting in the time here does yield rewards, but it might be easier and more rewarding to catch Books On Tape on tour.