Don’t read too much into genre. It’s a label, a brief tag all too quickly affixed in the hopes of giving a potential listener, wading through the haystack of web-hosted sound, a means to find a glimmer of the familiar. “Glitchstep” is the term Biting Eye (aka Ben Bridges, living in the Yau Tsim Mong district of Hong Kong) applied to his “BoYoDub,” a recently uploaded track to his soundcloud.com/biting-eye page. Not the specific “glitch” or the ubiquitous (to the point of meaningless) “dubstep” but an amalgam. The “glitch,” here a prefix, may relate to the switchy switchy percussion, the way beats, especially during the piece’s strong opening, have a tendency to decay, as if the mere responsibility of metronomic succession is too much for their hair-trigger, short-circuit constitution. The result is beats that push at momentum and then evaporate, appearing again, and again, each appearance more hesitant than the prior, to the extent that they serve a contrary purpose. Rather than imposing order they divulge its futility. As for “step,” it must correlate with the dank downtempo drone that comprises the majority of the tonal material. Don’t read too much into genre; that’s been taken care of.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/biting-eye, which also includes field recordings of Bridges’ neighborhood.
Any upcoming gigs by bitingeye?