May 20, 2011

Friday night live at Transistor: Wes Imel and Casual Encounter. Sound by Dominic Armstrong.

Wes Imel is a guitarist/electronic musician based in Uptown. He uses distortion, reverb, drum machines and a variety of electronic gadgets to produce a brainstorm. Feel the sound surround you as your thoughts move from the cerebral cortex and begin piercing your frontal lobe. Wes doesn't write music about anything in particular but hopes that that his combination of sounds and energy encourages listeners to separate themselves from the monotony of daily life and appreciate their surroundings. Wes performs with visual accompaniment produced by Juan Salamanca and Ryan Schiedt, who manipulate algorithmically-generated designs in real time using reactivision technology.

Also available: interviews Wes did on Transistor Radio’s Roundtable program (June 6, 2010 and November 7, 2010).

Primitive, creepy and as cold as a lab table, Casual Encounter produce a genuine industrial sound, one based on sound timbre, experimentation and disturbance. The band takes back every element of industrial and New Wave that has been stripped of meaning and ingenuity over the past 25 years. If you can remove the power chords and metal solos, hip-hop and techno that have infiltrated electronic music, then you'd be convinced that Casual Encounter is an unspoiled relic of the genre's early evolution. Tonally the group threatens to drown itself in dream-like decadence but keeps afloat with its allegiance to minimalism, disruptive sounds and cloying maniacal vocals.