Ever since Stephen Sharp and Roc Jimenez de Cisneros embarked on the deconstructive process they refer to as "Rave Synthesis," the goal was to come up with odd relatives of well-established sounds in techno culture by constantly messing with the original recipes, expanding the tropes, and hinting at novel paths for contemporary psychedelia. Almost three years after the influential Rave Slime, Evol's fifth album takes the idea one step further. The content of Proper Headshrinker was first presented in public as part of the group exhibition "Recurrence, Repetition, Hypnosis and Ritual," curated by Paul Purgas at Fargfabriken, Stockholm, 6/12/12-1/13/13. In the show, right next to the speakers playing these tracks, the sentence "Like a balloon producing balloons, producing balloons" was printed on the wall in Pantone 805 fluorescent red, the same color used on the cover of the album. As it turns out, the title of the exhibition almost feels like the perfect tagline for Proper Headshrinker. The ten tracks on the album are unlikely techno anthems, stripped-down hoovers, and deformed super-saws driven by extremely simple cyclic patterns. Ten pieces of identical length that focus on continuity, neighborhood, and iteration, but also on sameness, insideness and outsideness. Sharp and Jimenez de Cisneros have used key words such as "slime," "stretching," "sonic Play- Doh," "squeezing" or "folding" to illustrate the notion of homeomorphism (a metaphor borrowed from topology) in relation to the structural developments and the way in which tone bends in their rave synthesis tracks. On Proper Headshrinker, though, this continuous deformation is much more oblique, since the only source of variation in these monolithic structures comes from subtle phase modulations. The resulting straightforward brutality demands deep listening and, as usual, proper playback volume. Mastered by Russell Haswell in Suffolk. Cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin.
