Brighton artist and producer Stephen Maskell - moonlighting as Violet Cowboy - returns with an epic sixth release on Kit Records. ??????? ?? ??? ?????? ???? finds the sonic sculptor in playful mood, thumbing the flipbook through mulchy blues guitar, gothic storytelling, elasticated dub and gossamerlike classical minimalism.
Maskell's flow state seems to exist in the pocket where genres meld, and no sound is safe or sacred. His archive slops like a bargain bin of British culture, topped up on gleeful trawls through the map's ripest folds and furrows. This new collection is part glitched spaghetti western, part macabre travelogue, and - true to form - wholly too slippery to define.
Violet Cowboy is a techno flâneur: an unmoored observer and connoisseur of urban mythology, roving like a cyber dandy between the frames of a reekingly complex cityscape. "Tonight I'm in a window watching everyone watching being watched, and the faces that pass and the stories I make up for them." In ?????? ????'s frightening closing scenes, Maskell yanks Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Man of the Crowd' across pungent cobbles and through a tangle of glassy computer processes.
For all its interludes, tangents and jump scares, ??????? is the sound of an artist losing himself in the art of making - and somehow helping us make sense of the world we find ourselves in as he does it.
Recommended if you like Moondog, Ry Cooder, Autechre, Arvo Pärt.