Richard Devine: Asect:Dsect

Overstimulation is easy, but making computer music that goes beyond overstimulation isn't. Like most of his peers in the heady, fractious realm of Intelligent Dance Music, Richard Devine knows how to pile sound into vastly complex structures. More importantly, he also knows how to survey those structures' makeup and amplify their critical patterns. Devine has run alongside Autechre since he helped establish Miami's Schematic label as a rare U.S. depot for IDM, but he's always flashed a glimmer of his own personality–a gaudy bass sound here, an uncommonly moving ambient swath there. He works all his best tricks together on Asect:Dsect, a deliriously dense album that might qualify as a sonic assault if it didn't sound so measured and sensible as a whole. How that works in relation to teeth-gnashing stompers like "Rusx Fee" is hard to account for in isolation, but even at his most frantic, Devine never falls for nihilistic noise. His music moves even as it erodes and evaporates, infusing splintered rhythms with a bit of swing and manipulating them with agile robot arms. More like old musique concrete than new hard-drive science, the deep ambient passage that opens Asect:Dsect shows Devine's way with big-picture composition, which comes in handy as the album pulls all of its component parts toward a heaving center of gravity. A loping beat creeps into the second track, and by the third drops full-on into an awesome display of hip-hop's boom-bap and the off-balance accents of drum 'n' bass sharing duties. Devine builds continuously from there, smearing grinds and shrieks across the stereo field and evoking not just gears, but entire factory complexes, with interlocking figures that signal the architectural logic they work so well to defy. There isn't a naturalistic sound anywhere on Asect:Dsect, but rarely has an IDM album made clicking and dragging sound so hands-on and dexterous.