AUTORHYTHM - Self Help Manual (Artist and Repertoire) [Proto-Present Beats]
- The Slow Music Movement
- 12 hours ago
- 2 min read
Joakim Forsgren flits between the audible and visual artists with ease and admirable quality in both areas - just hit play and fire up his website; his art is genuinely impressive. Despite being a relative newcomer when it comes to releasing music, although I suspect that there are a few hard drives full of earlier experiments, he's already evolved a pretty distinctive, minimal - in both compositional, instrument and equipment senses. Less is sometimes more.
This album is a double achievement, being completed at the same time as a life-altering, possibly saving medical intervention, with most of the tracks recorded in his home studio and family surrounds, and then edited in his bed of all places; not that you can detect any yawns or eye rubbing in the recordings.
The album sounds like all your favourite proto-genre recordings: no-wave, digi-dub, synth pop, post-punk, krautrock, hip hop. You know that sort of sound where a young musician decades ago, who was full of ideas and attitude but still learning his instrument (or not), picked up an early drum machine and one of those new-fangled synths to unleash their creative energy; started jamming and pushed those basic machines past their intended limits and aims. That sort of sound? Except Self Help Manual was mastered by Rashad Becker and sounds amazing.
If you're a verse, chorus, verse, catchy melody sort of listener, turn away now. The album kicks off in crunching, bass speaker-testing vintage sci-fi hinting fashion, and plots a stripped-back retro-anchored course throughout. Dub references and reggae-inspired bass simplicity (and effectiveness) abound. Synths variously evoke musical history with sly nods and knowing winks; add edge to already insistent rythmic patterns; or float through the speakers like it's a televised performance from the base of an Egyptian pyramid.
Perhaps due to twenty years of music retromania, or perhaps because it's such a welcome rejection to the overpolished generic DAW-driven productions of today, there is a present-day vitality and urgency the LP as well, akin to downgrading your smartphone to a dumb flip phone, and starting to read books rather than social media posts. It's simple music for smart listeners.
Playlist Companion
Find Autorhythm in the Slow Oddities Playlist.