Cassette Review: Magnetizer "Plug Into Power" (Eternal Bleep Bloop)

$20 //
https://magnetizer.bandcamp.com/album/plug-into-power-abyssian-town-morpheus //

"Plug Into Power" is one of three cassettes released by EBB for Magnetizer.   They come together as a set- which is what the link with this review is for- but I'm going to break them down into three separate reviews because this is just full of that much music.    While I have been listening to electronic music for quite some time, I feel like it makes up something like 15% to 25% tops of what I listen to overall.   In this sense, it has me unable to pull for influences as easily as I would like to (or could for rock music, for example) though I have been listening to CDX and Daniel Avery lately.    But I also feel like it has me struggling to describe the sounds as I'm not sure what makes them outside of a few instruments.

This cassette opens with soft tones and the claps found on a drum machine.   It's a mellow sort of electronics but I'm not sure if I would call it chillwave.   After an audio clip the pace picks up and it gets heavier as well.   As a soundtrack, I could see this working for the movie "Hackers" and in a lot of ways that's more important to me than the elements which go into creating the sounds: the ideas of what this could be the soundtrack to exactly.   I could imagine listening to this while staying up all night on your PC in 1996 and trying to hack the system.

A more serious back and forth sound takes us into rapping with a sax.    Killer beats and drum machine guns bring out static skip beats as well.   (See, I don't know the technical term for that but I feel like it has something to do with... cymbals?)   Steady beats and that unce unce sound take us into something more like "Alias" or "Run Lola Run", which is on Side B now, so we've shifted from a staying inside and causing trouble to going outside and running from the law type of feel.   A climbing synth feel, someone says "Be anywhere" and then slower tones, more spaced out in a way, bring this cassette to an end.

In some ways, I feel like this could be the soundtrack to the movie "Hackers" and nothing else as in that movie they spent time both indoors and outdoors.   But what I like to think is that a lot of the planning is done on Side A- long, sleepless nights and just manipulating the system.  On the flip side you get that feeling of being outside and running around.   Though, I suppose, if you were to pace yourself to this while exercising it would also work.   You could start off at a moderate pace, a walk or jog, and then stop when the first side ends, flip it and run as fast as you can all the way back home.