“Local Presence” by Evasdad is one of those blissfully center-less pieces of music. On initial glance, it bears various hallmarks, all of them always slightly out of reach. Tonally it has touches of loungey techno. Rhythmically it feels downtempo. Melodically it has elements of the post-classical. At any given moment you might register it as ambient. In the end it’s both none and all of those. It outright refuses any metric rigidity, to the extent that it removes techno from the running. It is in many ways far too anxious, brimming with elements and teetering on chaos, to provide the comfort of downtempo. It may arguably be post-classical, what with its marimba-like instrumentation, but it never feels part of a literature. And while it’s ambient at any given instance, the shifts between those instances are each more glitchy than the previous. It’s a great piece that continuously tricks the ear into thinking it’s being lulled when, in fact, it is being concertedly challenged.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/evasdad. Evasdad is George Cicci of Morgantown, West Virginia.