If music had a circulatory system, then "Intervals'" the most recent single from early 21st-century digital music collective Entropic Front, would be a symmetrical beat of a neuron, an erratic series of electrical bursts, unpredictable, vital, and alive.
Around a genre that gets a bit hung up on form and repetition, "Intervals" is a relentless outlier. No singing, no verses, no choruses, just a bracing, staccato instrumental reggaeton track that pulses and jolts, swells, and recedes, with surgical precision, for its run time. The piece doesn't so much unfold as it does ricochet. Every moment is a new shape, yet it's all stitched together by an overarching symphonic logic that feels both methodical and entirely unbound at the same time. It's no coincidence that this track is called "Intervals." Entropic Front lives in the various spaces between things, those strange and amazing in-between places where most music would not pause to lay a note. Here, silences are not absences, they are signatures. This topography synthesizes as it emerges. The listening experience is a succession of short, medium-length gaps and abrupt reentries into a recently evacuated tonal space. It's an examination of entropy and return, of disorder and memory.
By tone, "Intervals" is a highwire act between boom and bower. There are occasions when it feels cold, almost clinical, but equally, with this weedy orifice, suddenly, the piece will crack open to reveal a rush of color or warmth. It's music that mirrors real life in its most mercurial, impulse-driven, and agenda-bereft thoughts, which begin, stall, and double back. This is not the background music for your morning commute. This is the music for when the rules end up going out the window.
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