REVIEW: Hold R1 by Aeriae by Liz Seymour Arts Hub Friday, December 14, 2007 At the risk of sounding as though I just cycled all the way from 1972 to write this review, Aeriae’s Hold R1 would seem to be best described by a whole parade of terms my mother would still have felt groovy applying to our Commodore 64 “word processing machine”. Self-described as “retro-technical”, it was difficult to listen to Sydney-based electronic composer/producer Wade Clarke’s studio project and not be plagued by Beyond 2000-style adjectives eclipsing the remainder of the suitable lexicon. This fixation on “futuristic” and “space age” is not entirely outrageous for someone whose known contact with electronic music had previously extended to singing along with her prehistoric dial-up internet, and a brief and since-repressed infatuation with the folk-electro fusion of Deep Forest. As instructed by the accordingly computer-generated insert, I sat lotus-like and “for best results, play(ed) CD loudly through quality hi-fi equipment”. The reasons for this direction became clear as the opening bars of Clique muscled out of the speakers like Deep Forest with shoulder pads. This progressed to a dense, random mix of blipping beats skittering over rich chords and more traditional, recurring instrumental themes. What followed was an amphetamine-charged motherboard of sounds leaping from percussive, sparkling lunarscapes dappled by sputtering and scuttling in a virtual arctic night, to “White Girl” voices sampled to fashion a mirrored, fractured doll’s funhouse of sonic creep. The curiously-titled Areola was a nocturnal soup of bounce and crunch, while Skirr had me compulsively downing spearmint Tic-Tacs in a placebo-effect bid to bring my consciousness into line with what sounded like a seedy underground club inside a pinball machine. Karpa, Murano and Rizdvo all made returns to the hunted, rhythmic and enigmatic electro treatments of Middle Eastern and Asian traditional music, beautifully layered and with just enough adherence to form. If I’m not mistaken it would seem a computer is now capable of Tuvan singing – oh the new-fangledness! Included on the CD is an animated eight-bit style video clip to accompany the arcade sounds of AMay, however my fledgling techno prowess crashed and burned within the confines of a small pop-up which smugly informed me I was not equipped (in any way) to view it on my Personal Computer. Perhaps just as well, as by then my Tic-Tac supply and I were exhausted. (Here for your enjoyment is the clip, trusting you are equipped) Throughout the whole experience I was frequently accosted by vivid imagery of 80s post-apocalyptic films; the stilted, 2D graphics of prepubescent Sega days; blooms of electric light in a desolate, digitised dark; aluminium-clad post-millennial Sultans; and the squat, smirking denizens of an anarchic and perilous metropolis. They really should print the ingredients on Tic-Tacs. Hold R1 is available through Waterfront Records in Australia / Sydney, and through CD Baby and iTunes worldwide.