Electro MP3 EP

EBoss‘ three-song Electronic Brainscape EP opens, on “Elektro Body Music,” with a train’s distant thudding and a swivelling line of static. Though the heavy electro that follows may never achieve — let alone aspire to — the minimalist piquancy of this opening, the set earns repeated listens with its mindlessly thick beats, which have the gushy firmness of a Nerf football, and its occasional dissolution into abstraction. That initial track distinguishes itself from straight four-to-the-floor electro thanks to a midsection that’s nearly as self-immolating as the average laptop punk set, but minus the hand-me-down nihilism. With a keening overhead beep, it sounds like Carnival held in an eight-bit arcade. The EP may very well take its cues from videogames, for as full as the sound is, EBoss (aka Eric Bertrand) has a tendency to switch suddenly between thematic segments in a jerky, off-the-downbeat manner that suggests a player moving from one level to the next. Electronic Brainscape is among the recent free downloadable MP3 sets from the Microbio netlabel, at microbiorecords.net.