INDEPENDENCE DAY
DATACH’I
System After a ten-year hiatus, Joseph Fraioli, aka Datach’i, returns with his seventh album, System. The interim has seen huge changes for Fraioli; his last LP, Shock Diamonds, prodded at the boundaries of what music could be, often tumbling into abstract sound collages and digital abysses. It was a step towards the realm of sound design, which is exactly what Fraioli ended up doing for ten years after that, with his award- winning company Jafbox. While System could be said to retain some sound design elements, it finds Datach’i at his most structured, jettisoning the experimental nature of his earlier work for an album of ultradetailed IDM.
The album is rife with lush digital flourishes that land somewhere between alluring and intimidating, part of the dichotomy that Datach’i has pulled off of mechanical and organic; almost all tracks on the album have a slice of both. Whether it’s “Synthetic Metals,” which sounds like a steel-footed centipede convulsing on a girder, what could be an ethereal fog being hammered into form on “Monarchs” or even “Nebulae V2,” which comes off like a computer’s first attempt at trying to replicate summer rain, System is a beautiful splicing of opposites. System is one of the best IDM albums to emerge over the past couple of years. (Timesig, planet.mu)
WHAT’S YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH THE MODULAR SYNTH?
What really triggered a lot of inspiration for me was I stopped thinking of it as this inanimate object — this is an artificial intelligence of sorts. I’m just putting vague parameters on this thing to get it operating on its own.
DO YOU THINK YOU’D STILL BE MAKING MUSIC WITHOUT THE CURRENT ADVANCEMENTS IN TECHNOLOGY?
For me, it’s very specific — I’m very process-orientated. If I didn’t have it, would I just go to Ableton and make tracks? Probably not, because I don’t enjoy that process. For me, it’s all about what inspires me and what process do I enjoy, because that usually yields the best results, at least ones that I’m personally happy with. DARYL KEATING