Mutant

The record’s lack of organization and resistance to stasis work against its accessibility. Those willing to mine such a dense work will be rewarded in a visceral sense, but may be left groping in the darkness for a specific, externally-fabricated meaning. Either way, the abstractness and wandering abandon of Mutant define not only the album, but Alejandro Ghersi’s approach to music.

Almost every track has a fearsome radiance to its high end and even in those parts without drums or squared off structures, the surges of sound recall collective dancefloor ecstasies. [Dec 2015, p.44]

Shuffle and skip for best results. [Jan 2016, p.71]

The downside of the now-ness, the resistance against static definition, is lack of resolution. Mutant is hard to listen to, sometimes in a salutary way and sometimes not.

It is undoubtedly made to be heard in one sitting. It may not always be a comfortable listen over the course of its hour, it will unflinchingly show you its grotesque beauty, and each listener's reactions and visions produced in the face of such peculiarities will be unique.

Somehow, despite the maelstrom of sound and texture, Mutant never topples in to destruction. But perhaps the fact that it does teeter that much closer to the edge is the reason that it never quite matches its predecessor's more solid appeal.

Perhaps the NSFW art and videos for Vanity and En skew the narrative, but Mutant feels even more sexual than its predecessor.

Whatever the aural equivalent of a spectacle might be, that's Mutant, which firmly establishes its creator as an auteur.

The forms are extraordinary and the surfaces dazzling, but it's unclear how to navigate through them. You're impressed but also confused, and you keep an eye out for the exit. Several tracks shine regardless.

Fast pacing and fragmentary delivery show how Mutant’s tracks operate as experiments in obsessive dysmorphia, taking flaws and magnifying them to scale drama, affect, and beauty out of digital refuse. Exhilarating moments are found next to tracks that only feature impact tail-ends, panned and swirled around a headspace to suspend spatiality further.

Aside from the brutal norm its twenty, overwhelming tracks follow, Mutant is also capable of digging up gold.

As disarmingly brilliant Mutant can be at times, it’s still deliberately obscure.

Distressing, transcendental and beautiful, it’s a journey so remarkable it could excuse a hundred false starts.

Mutant, even as it threatens to filibuster itself at over an hour long, feels like the album that Xen was meant to grow into, with every lesson that Vulnicura taught integrated at a molecular level.

Its bustling, condensed epics refuse to present a single, easily digestible vision of the world, yet in so doing they end up revealing this world in all its beautifully chaotic truth.

Whereas Xen had the odd, satisfyingly familiar beat pattern, Mutant is even more punk. It dives headlong into an emotional abyss and proceeds with a rhyme or reason that's up to listeners to determine.

It’s a testament to his cohesive sound and willingness to defy convention that this record, despite a lack of samples or anything really resembling typical electronic music, conveys emotion as well as it does.

Mutant unfurls like a singular body, and its nuanced empathy with the shame and horror and joy of corporeality makes it an enthralling piece to experience.

The result of this endless metamorphosis--it's over an hour long--is an album that is eventually rewarding, but only to those who are determined to follow its scattered pathway to the satisfying, aggregate end.