Jib Kidder delivers an uncanny dance LP featuring no-input mixer sequenced together with drum machine. It steers the chaotic atmosphere of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music (1975) towards an emotive tide of information that, whether too much or too little, makes it hard to grasp but easy to eat up. If electronic music has been made familiar (through musique concréte or Lee Gamble) with the conversion of noise into dance, New Works For Realistic Mixer circumscribes this progression within a less stable relationship: what might be called, after Stella, the marriage of reason and squalor.
