What Rankin has created here feels more like an open-environment video game it is still digitally rendered and hyperreal, but there is space to explore, with variations on recurring motifs and even a central character: a MIDI cello set to pizzicato mode. Previous albums approximated the immersive, endless scroll, where images, ideas, and sounds fly by, leaving pockmarks of dopamine spike and withdrawal. While 2017’s Soft Channel unified these approaches, it was also more turbulent and unpredictable, full of moments where Rankin tried his best to induce sensory overload, a tactic he once again inverts on his new album Mirror Guide.įour years in the making, Mirror Guide feels like the opening of a new chapter for Giant Claw. With Deep Thoughts a year later, he recontextualized nominally cheesy MIDI approximations of choruses, pan pipes, and strings by twisting them into complex contrapuntal wanderings-similar to what Wendy Carlos might have conjured after taking a hit of DMT. Synthesizers were supplanted by the plunderphonic bliss of anonymized R&B samples, fractured trap beats, and stuttering loops on 2014’s Dark Web, sounding at times like several SoundCloud windows playing simultaneously. Due to his insatiable appetite for novel sounds, he’s repeatedly upended his production techniques only to emerge with a new aesthetic framework time after time. Noise is central to Rankin’s music, but those pockets of pixelated chaos are surrounded by splashes of vibrant color and vaguely familiar fragments of melody.
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