I had first contact with Bradford Cox, the man aka Atlas Sound, through an in-the-studio-video of his band Deerhunter, in which I saw an awkward-looking young man sunk in himself, doing rock music. It wasn't anything special in my eyes, and so were weren't the songs I heard from this band in the following months at some blogs, etc. What I first heard about Atlas Sound were 4 full albums of demos he put out for free download, which his label didn't find so amusing and withdrew. It was pretty clear that this young guy must have a real fluent output, and after listening to some of these demos (on youtube, I think), I had this feeling that I couldn't quite grab the songs - a feeling I found disturbing at first. I learned a little later that he would never write lyrics in advance (a thing he has in common with Jay-Z, just a little side-glimpse) because he believes in Stream-of-Consciousness as his engine in music. In this regard, he is similar to Mark Holllis, who says that everything sounds best when it is first played, and everything after that is just an imitation of the original. This approach gives Cox's songs a very light and airy feeling; magic happens, the magic that you would usually destillate and probably mess up with more work-over, magic that is preserved in Atlas Sound.
So when his newest proper release 'Parallax' was released a few weeks ago, I went and dove into it. It is not a cozy place to swim, you must hold your air if you want to hang. The songs keep the ungrabable beauty (kinda like in 'The perfume' by P.Süskind) and jumps from one boat into another without thinking too much. It is a pretty disturbing listen - maybe that word is too powerful though, it is more creepy and foggy. These songs I can listen to and not get a hold of, which is beautiful in comparison to all the finely structured easily listenable pieces that float around the audiosphere in high doses at present.
I really liked Parallax and could tell that he's a good musician with something to tell, even if it couldn't be named.. or maybe because it couldn't be exactly named.
Then today I heard a recording of a show he played some days ago, on December 18th, at NYCs Bowery Ballroom. And this then blew my mind completely. He performs alone, and both his acoustic guitar and voice go into a loop station. Lots of people are using this now, they usually use it for a few patterns, extremely planned out. But Bradford really plays with this thing, he makes it sound so big and wall-like, and he just does it as he goes along. You can hear the artistic spark in every tone of these 105 minutes. He builds and builds and tears down and play along, soloes, sings along. There is something so wild and precious in his performance, but you can hear he is not thinking too much, just enough to not fully stop playing.
