Co-opted

On Participant by Ex Continent

David Sutton

Disillusioned, peppering yourself around the metropolitan sprawl you call home; the one that used to bellow experiential void filler? A common malady of these days, in times of such velocity; Participant conjures perfectly the feeling of when the city you have called home becomes an unfamiliar and alien place. The initial broad stroke of the record echoes that drifting feeling of wandering around streets layered and dismantled in objects of context, motions towards something lost and gone. Classic synthetic waves drift between an evenly dispersed field of phasing pointillism beckoning the listener into fluorescent passages and steam filled corridors. You can hear our familiar human breath in the distance, the same yard dog- but there is a recognizable gap between the wanderer and the landscape. The effectiveness of Participant’s active paradox is its inclusion of the near world of our five senses, through field recordings passing into and out of focus, but also its acknowledgment of our growing unnaturalness through the sleekness in the synthetic movements in sound; closing in perfectly on our separation into convoluted virtual spaces that often direct our motives more than the physical spaces we inhabit. Participant does not present a monolithic anthem of our tech infused new world but instead soundtracks its strangeness and the sociopolitical situations it can further unsettle and moreover leaves a pathway for the human to interface with this varied landscape as so much of its contemporaries do not.