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 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.The West Coast producer on shunning samples. Bryan Hollon (aka Boom Bip) first surfaced to wide recognition with his frayed concept album, Circle, in 2001. When John Peel likened the sound of the record to Captain Beefheart, he understood the producer’s sprawling and schizoid musical mess rubbing up against Dose One’s nasal chug of free association. In 2003, Hollon freeze-dried clattering acoustic instruments into the digital soundscapes of Seed To Sun, an album that realigned him with a mid-path of indie crossover and thoughtful experimentation, while (be it good or bad) further introducing his sounds to advertising creatives. With Blue Eyed In The Blue Room, you get the impression that Boom Bip’s hip-hop background has reared its head in a neatly regressive, but ultimately jaw-dropping manner. The album’s electronic threads whirl around motifs borrowed from loads of different genres. The opener brings to mind New Order’s clumsy synth washes, underpinned by the thunk of an ambient kick. Dumb Day hikes a pedestrian autoharp phrase to cathedral heights. The Matter Of Our Discussion slugs Morricone twang, Sonic Youth squall and Neptunes handclaps towards exaltation. Sometimes this beguiling mush drops into a rather sanitized and overly accomplished whole, but often they jar abrasively, with genres twirling on and on. Where some instrumental projects raise a couple of vocal tracks as a vague distraction, the final word on Blue Eyed wraps Nina Nastasia around a rising and familiar atmosphere. Lyrics that could be misconstrued as corny become affecting, powerful and genuinely moving. And these moments occur so frequently throughout, that whenever you fear being sucked into a soporific trance, some sort of revelatory and/or beautiful thing happens. Likewise, the collaboration with Gruff Rhys (from Super Furry Animals) tacks his psychedelic folk delivery over a building clatter of marching drum pounds.  Boom Bip is creating something cohesive from disparate elements: “I rarely get nervous about swinging too far in any direction of music, but my taste keeps me within bounds. I think this comes from me having a sampling background. Nothing was off limits when I was sampling.” However, you get the feeling that Boom Bip’s recent decision to mostly ditch samples (the sleeve claims that “no samples were harmed in the making of this album”) was born out of some sort of crisis, and that this push and pull with the sampling ethic has caused the awkward fusion that falls from Blue Eyed. Hollon enlarges: "For me to be satisfied with myself, I need to take music seriously and get more out of it. Instruments and songwriting help me to do that."
James Rutledge
Boom Bip – Blue Eyed In The Red Room, released 21 February 05 on Lex Records.
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 boom bipalbum review  lex recordslabel profile
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