Home > audiofiles

Freeplay: Rob Steady
By Cassie Hood
hoodc@mscd.edu

Rob Steady Ask No Lies

The technological age has taken music by storm. With seemingly unplanned noises spurting from records into speakers, the brain is fiercely forced to interpret the mood each sound expresses.

Rob Steady knows how to melt the mind with his psychotic electronica music. Ask No Lies is an adventure through the cerebral cortex into the sensory systems. It moves the head with each random beat, and in the end, it confuses the axons causing mild brain hysteria.

“Redo New Things” hops from beat to beat. Melting into funky guitar riffs and keyboard backups, it breaks into the auditory form of a seizure, as it reaches speeds that are nearly impossible to follow.

On “Mood Swings” Steady integrates docile piano tunes with conga drums, trumpets and cymbals. It truly embodies a person going through a mood swing, and conjures up the visual of a person starting their day with a happy, hopeful tone, then falling into a sullen depression reaching a brief moment of utter despair.

The title track, “Ask No Lies,” breaks into pieces from the beginning. It doesn’t follow any pattern, unless it is one of a fractal format copying itself as it falls apart. Steady defies normality by pretending to find a common beat and then blowing it to bits.

He also sets himself apart from the rest of the techno world by promising to never repeat what he has already done. Each song melts into the previous, but consists of totally new elements. There are no common beats in any of the songs, and the sheer lack of any pattern makes the album more interesting as each track changes.

With its fluid changeover between songs, Ask No Lies becomes one long mind trip, one that should not be taken with the help of drugs, for acid would surely cause insanity if mixed with this abnormal, 28 minutes of intense noise.

Download Rob Steady’s Ask No Lies EP at http://12rec.net/Release_Rob-Steady_019.htm.