- Maurice Fulton's jam band returns with their strangest, spaciest and most singular record to date.
- Close your eyes for a second and ask yourself: what does a Maurice Fulton record sound like? For every absolutely transcendent deep house tune, there's an electroclash classic (Mu), or flower-themed club music (BOOF) or spiritual jazz (Eddie and the Eggs). In one of his few interviews, Fulton explained that listening to the Basement Boys, an early Baltimore house duo, taught him "to derange music in a certain way." This derangement feels like the uniting thread behind all of his projects—a way of deforming and reforming music into some of dance music's most delightfully fucked-up Frankensteins. And for all his shapeshifting, no project is as out there as Syclops.
In the Fulton cosmology, Syclops has its own mythos. When the project put out their debut LP in 2008, it wasn't totally clear what role Fulton actually played in the group. Syclops was sort of a band, with the Finnish jazz group of Hanna Sarkari, Jukka Kantonen and Sven Kortehist along for the ride. Since 2018's Pink Eye, the project has solidified into the trio of Fulton, Sarkari and Mim Suleiman (handling guitars and the live percussion). Black Eye takes everything the trio have done thus far—broken drums, basslines compressed beyond recognition, bizarro synthesizers—and expands it to the nth degree.
The record is split between tracks that could be called house tunes—or at least they're not not house tunes —and cuts that are best described as completely bonkers. Even the traditional-ish songs still sound like Alice arriving in a technicolor Oz from a monochrome Kansas. "Kelly Where Are Your Keys" is somewhere between vintage tech house and contemporary UK techno as the squiggly chatter of synth sounds like "Cactus"-era Objekt. That is, before the track builds to a breakdown of boogie piano keys. The album's most subtle selection, "Jason and Paul," also throws a curveball as the trio turn a deep, dubby loop inside out with some freewheeling synth solos.
Black Eye is heavier and harder than anything Syclops has done before. The first Syclops LP came out on DFA, and the group has never been afraid of leaning into the more distorted end of the dance punk continuum, but not quite like this. The guitar on "I'm Missing A Crab Leg" is put through so many pedals it sounds deep fried. The hand drums on "Karo Is Going Swimming" are arranged like a hardcore band preparing for a mosh pit to formwhile short-circuiting bleeps rush across the stereo.
From tech house to dance punk, from dub to free jazz, Black Eye is a record packed so full of ideas it feels like it might collapse in on itself in a whirlpool of drum machines and sawtooth basslines. It's Fulton's most maximalist record to date, but it's also the group's best (as the early consensus attests to). Fulton has always been one of clubland's most enigmatic characters—famously press shy, sure, but also just hard to pin down sonically. Here he leans into every eccentricity he's been cooking up for the past 30 years ,and the result is a record that is both irreverent and masterful, a tour de force of experimental club music for and from the underground.
Lista de títulos01. The Penatrata
02. Pink Sarah NYC Is Back
03. LA Nelson
04. Kelly Where Are Your Keys
05. Black Eye
06. Jason & Paul
07. Karo Is Going Swimming
08. Vanessa With D
09. Im Missing A Crab Leg Michele
10. 5 Right
11. New Bro's In NYC 06:01