C. Spencer Yeh, Okkyung Lee, and Lasse Marhaug's "Wake Up, Awesome" is an apt target for Coogan's comments, a clever bit of juggling that pulls out every available trick to make itself conspicuously meaningless. Elegant bits of string performance mix with studio chop-and-screw, funny mouth noises, cello farts, and dusty samples. It has no coherence as an artistic product, except what it is not—the album is an exercise in negativity, in showing what its creators are trying to avoid. And as with so many projects that begin with this attitude, it quickly becomes enslaved to technique.
The bulk of sound on the LP is devoted to a virtuoso production exercise, of the "what is that noise" variety. There are few structures besides repetition. There is tempo, sort of, but no time.
