Omit - Interceptor (2CD)
Helen Scarsdale Agency – hms 012 - 2008 - USA. Listen: https://helenscarsdale.bandcamp.com/album/interceptor
"omit is the nom de plume for clinton williams, an electronic musician who has been quietly toiling in new zealand for a good portion of the past two decades. his work has appeared alongside such luminaries of the nz free noise community as birchville cat motel, the dead c, flies inside the sun, dean roberts, surface of the earth, etc.; however, omit’s home-spun constructs widely detour from the sculpted grit and mottled distortion found in the work of his countrymen and -women. in listening to his masterful quad (a 3cd opus released in 1998 through corpus hermeticum), one gets the very palpable sense of an artist in a contentious argument with his own unwieldy mousetrap of tape-loops, modular electronics, effects pedals, drum machines, and the creaking sounds of his house. that internal debate with himself through his machine exudes an existential melancholy, which could be applied to any number of grander metaphors of the dependency of electronics, cybernetics, and technology upon mankind.
interceptor is the result of an experiment whereby williams worked with a portable studio away from his longtime home of blenheim. he possessed two suitcases of drum machines, effects, and analog synths; and, williams recalls being "pissed off with myself wasting time recording this stuff when i was trying to find a job." his frustrations stripped away much of the grandiose sweeps of ambience and shadow, leaving behind a life-support system grid of overlapping, phase-shifted blip and click. an undertow of hypnotic tonalities pulls those rhythms towards a crepuscular gloom. williams has always been at odds with his own work, yet his self-doubt continues to deliver magnificent albums which thrive in a symbiotic struggle with mechanical disintegration. interceptor conjures the best offered by mika vainio, klaus schulze, and the throbbing gristle tracks authored by chris carter. always the pessimist, williams grumbles, "in many ways, it’s a document of my failure to do the most simplest things in life." if only all of our failures could be this brilliant. "