Album Review: Suspect – Faux Empath

Suspect (AKA Ryan Beck, Iowa City to Chicago transplant) is part of the ever-growing group of artists — many with recordings released on former Iowa Citian Shawn Reed’s Night People label — who are seeking to find a new musical path based on techno music, but outside the club/dancefloor/rave world from which techno arose. As an old-school proper techno fan I’m fascinated by this idea; like Iowa City’s Giant Question Mark, the inspiration comes not so much from Jeff Mills or Adam Beyer, but from the machines themselves.

On his most recent release, Faux Empath, Suspect uses the steady four beat rhythm as an anchor to explore sound and mood. Having that grid — as rectilinear and confining as Mondrian’s black lines — gives Beck license to layer and combine melodic ideas in the form of lush filtered chords, echoing wood block hits and snatches of heavily processed vocal samples.

“Club Cop” in particular has a lovely ambient haze to it, anchored by a repeated single note synth pattern, which drifts and wavers slightly in pitch. That trick, borrowed from Boards of Canada, takes something monotonous and subtly adds tension.

“Net Prosthetic” starts out sounding more like horror movie sound design, with vague, hard to place noises fading in and out within cavernous reverberations. At the halfway point, a more conventional techno track gradually spins up, again using an unsteady pitch to destabilize the listener.

Beck included an artist’s statement with the music, saying, “This album addresses the ideological complication that begins to arise as technology continues to function as a prosthetic for our consciousness.” Instrumental music, without the narrative binding of lyrics, can’t really carry the freight of ideas like that, even if they informed its creation. This music may have been built with specific concepts in mind, but to a listener it is purely sensory. To me, it gives the sensation of walking through Blade Runner’s Los Angeles, or experiencing a blurry, hallucinogenic nostalgia for a future that never happened. But you can choose your own adventure with Faux Empath; it’s a soundtrack for a movie that happens in your own mind.

This article was originally published in Little Village issue 198.

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