There is a kaleidoscope at the heart of every city, and it is made of noise. It would seem that Brideburger, who resides in Ipswich, England, evokes the throbbing pulse of a place that is in the midst of transition: everything is abstract and concrete at the same time. Kaleidoscopeflows at times like a drone album, slow-paced and yet infinitely marked by feedback as well as dozens of electronic effects. At other times it pushes the effects to the forefront, mutating into harsh noise, but only to draw out the fiery walls of sound into a well-sculpted aural river, retaking control. A very interesting use of volume is in play, suddenly turning the decibels up and down as if one were shifting the position of the looking glass, and it feels like wandering throughout streets with no name, interrupted by buildings, other roads, other people. The only constant thing apart from self-awareness is the change occurring with each and every step, a wheel of colors that, like the most abrasive moments of tracks like “The so called alternative”, is nevertheless always subjected to our will.
If you find yourself in Ipswich as it is now, you might catch the kind of exact moment of division that Kaleidoscope produces with sounds, finding yourself surrounded by contrasts: an abandoned building with cracked windows right next to a new apartment block, forming all sorts of disturbing little dead-ends, a weird black-glass building that looms over a couple roads and several more traditional buildings like a sinister inverse mirror, a bay full of nice boats and a yacht here and there on a river that has surely seen better days… it is a place that has a particularly intense kaleidoscope, and like the album, it doesn’t reconcile differences by imposing harmony; it places all the colors side by side, producing an entirely new effect, a noisy experience of unity-in-fragments. Like some of the latest efforts of Mike Shiflet, it brings together the excitement of violent electronics with the subtle clearness and rationality of music, forcing the ear into a trance similar to that of walking without aim, always attentive, always receptive, and always adventurous.
Needless to say, there is an ‘Ipswich’ in every city – that precise moment in time in which you realize a place is made of a thousand other places and times, finding yourself thrown right in the middle of what seems like a transition, a thousand shards of color only your eyes (and ears) can arrange into a complex totality that makes sense only as an optical game of illusions. And the best thing is, you’re always under control, and you need but shift the kaleidoscope to find out that very same space completely changed, in yet another transition. (David Murrieta)
a closer listen 