Reviewing noise albums can be a difficult task, particularly when they are made by a small enough project that turning to a search engine for background research with the phrase ‘500 Goats Unstructured tunes’ mostly yields organic chemistry journal articles and rural zoning ordinances. 500 Goats is a Spanish duo consisting of José Mª Pérez-Flor (Athene Noctu4) and Juan Cepas (Autodetuned). Both are established soloists in the Spanish experimental music scene. They started working together during the COVID-19 pandemic. Unstructured tunes is their fourth album and their first released on the relatively new Tokyo-based ambient/experimental label ato.archives.
Unsurprising for the creative milieu they are operating in, the most human point of connection is one that still falls squarely into the uncanny valley. Throughout the album, the two warp classic MacInTalk voices beyond the boundary of intelligible speech into glossolalia and at times seemingly extrude them into other sounds entirely. This motif is present from the very beginning of “feeding the brain chipper part 1,” where a computerized baritone croaks out the solfege scale (‘do- rei- mi-‘ etc.) before morphing into babbling and then cutting out entirely. It is replaced by field recordings of what seems to be a space of transit, echoes and milling people frequently obscured by sheets of sound processing and electroacoustics.
The second track, “Solar de cabras,” is a standout and is mainly comprised of reciprocating industrial metallic whines, as if Pérez-Flor and Cepas had mounted a whetstone inside a Leslie speaker. Towards the end of the mix, it brightens with what sounds like a looped airport or train station announcement chime cutting through the dissonance.
“feeding the brain chipper part 2” reprises many of the elements found in part 1—expressing the duo’s modus operandi that the album is an exercise in “allowing materials to interact, collide, and reconfigure […] within a flexible framework.” The MacInTalk voices are present at their most abstract, at times sounding closer to a broken cornet than speech synthesis. Rising, falling beeps and blats punctuate the piece, evoking early Carsten Nicolai or possibly the “electronic gurglings” of even more primordial excursions in computer music.
Unstructured tunes closes with “Nice weather,” the longest track at just over 16 minutes. The length affords the opportunity to sink into ambient segments. Some are dark and spacy, while others are teased from aquatic field recordings. But the relative placidity does not prevent 500 Goats from periodically emerging from the murk to add distortion before eventually submerging for the final time, or at least until the time is right for another album. (Marcello Ursic)
