Album Review: Digital Native by Polysick

“[Underground Resistance] are absolutely decisive influences: but it’s a classic and accomplished sound, so it’s difficult to compete with that style without being a faded copy of the original. However, you can still draw useful lessons from their music about immediacy and the instinct to preserve.”– Egisto Sopor a.k.a. Polysick, electronique.it When it comes to talking about technology and the future, an idea of utopia always forms a part of the initial stakes.

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Egisto Sopor is from Rome, which is a fantastic place to be from if your art is chiefly concerned with the past. He's been hanging around under his Polysick guise since 2010, releasing CD-Rs and tapes for labels like 100% Silk, aligning him with a group of underground-oriented analog fetishists currently mining 1980s dance music. Polysick's tracks are shorter and sparser than those of one-time labelmates Ital or Heatsick, and his debut album for Planet Mu, Digital Native, is full of proto-techno vignettes and swampy kraut ambles.

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This is: bucketloads of ambient analogue acid that wash all over the listener. This is not: bucketloads of ambient acid that slosh the listener abruptly in the face. Because Italian knob-twiddler Polysick has adopted synapse-tickling Balearica and a slow-mo psychedelic haze on his second full-lengther. There’s rambunctious fare on offer too – ‘Preda’ is propelled by a hefty Detroit bassline and closer ‘Smudge, Hawaii’’s motorik flavours are mostly agreeable – but far too often ‘Digital Native’ descends into aimless, muddled noodling.

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Digital Native is an odd name for Polysick’s debut LP. To start with, the album is an all-analog effort, 15 meandering, burbling modular creations. Does that make the title of the record ironic? A statement? Tongue-in-cheek?The minimal, pulsing loops at work in songs like “Lost Holidays” (which, at under two minutes, is more of a snippet of a song compared to slow-burners like “Transpelagic” or “Preda”) match the understated psychedelia of Polysick’s visual artwork.

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