Though famous for his Sega-sounding synth samples, Computer Jay succeeds because he's not really either a minimalist or an obscure gear head: he gives you some bold minimal and earlier-electronica flavors, but at his base, he has one major kick pedal foot pointed straight at the recent present. You get fooled by some songs into thinking, hey, this would have worked in a Mantronix set. And certainly his growling synth melodies don't go up and down the scale so much as they modulate, pitch-bend, like an old Gap-band synth or something Talking Heads would have used--or even like Silver Apples. There are little vintage synth chiming sounds on most tracks, and the late-era P-Funk insistent bass of "System Active" is so much like George Clinton's "Atomic Dog," you almost expect to hear some "Bow wow wow, yippie yo, yippie yay"s. But there's just a little scuff on the tracks, and tunes like "Omni Bent" or "The Great Wall of Self-Awareness" have far more complex, live-sounding drums, the kind that let you know straight-up that this isn't old-school, and isn't even exactly glitch, but something akin to the Intelligent Dance Music of the last decade. And believe me, you will dance.
