Employee#6817 – 20061027:1820

Album information:


Artist: Employee#6817
Album: 20061027:1820
Type: Full-length (LP)
Release date: 2006 / 20 July 2016
Label: The Basement Labs
Format:

  • Digital download (The Basement Labs, 2006)

 

Recommendation: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯


Employee#6817 is an experimental/noise musician who is most well-known within the vaporwave community for Eulogy, a double album that incorporated plunderphonics and a retro-digital aesthetic that was not too far removed from vaporwave proper. Most of the other Employee#6817 albums follow a similar route, but play up the noise side a bit more in contrast to the samplism that informed Eulogy. One of those is 20061027:1820, a curious release of early noise music from the artist.

The circumstances behind the release and theme of 20061027:1820 are a bit of an enigma: the title refers to the date 27 October 2006, but according to the label page at The Basement Labs, it was released in 2016. Discogs and RateYourMusic don’t alleviate the confusion, stating that it was released in 2006. These confusing little bits are endemic to Internet archiving as a whole, not just vaporwave – although the Internet was often hailed as the “death of geography” or the “death of time” in the mid-90s due to its ability to catalog and store everything, all too often misprints, deletions, and edits get magnified due to the ease by which information can be copied, making something as innocuous as an album release date seem funky.

20061027:1820 is a straight-up noise music release, and its featuring on Sunbleach is due to its relation to PC/Internet music at-large and its association with vaporwave via Eulogy. This twenty-one minute album does not feature harsh walls of noise, sound collages, or distortion – instead, Employee#6817 utilizes real-time circuit bending and industrial sound effects to create sonic experiments that are captured on the recording. The fidelity is nigh-perfect, with no redlining and high dynamic range. There are a few exceptions to the usual composition, and they’re mostly in the second half of the album. “Interlude: Goof Off & Eat Candy” is a minute of spoken word between what must be Empmloyee#6817 and an unknown person about the recording process. “Automatic Doors Non-Functional” features some deranged chiptune that sounds as if a piano melody has been sampled and time-stretched. Finally, “Rust Formation” features a slightly distorted cyberpunk melody that lapses into the seven-minute closer of “Re-Usable Cabling/SYN-ACK”, which is quieter than the rest of the album.

20061027:1820 doesn’t quite hold up to Eulogy (vaporwave notwithstanding), but it might appeal to listeners who enjoy hearing producers experiment with the far reaches of electronic music.

 

Tracklist


1. Defensive Front – (1:38)
2. Flooded Stairwell – (0:40)
3. Service Elevator 3b – (2:06)
4. Connecting Tunnel – (1:49)
5. Interlude: Goof Off & Eat Candy – (1:18)
6. Disco Engine Short Circuit – (0:44)
7. Auxiliary Pumps – (2:11)
8. Automatic Doors Non-Functional – (2:19)
9. Mainframe Storage Room – (0:49)
10. Rust Formation – (1:15)
11. Re-Usable Cabling/SYN-ACK – (6:55)


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