ISSUE Project Room : an open and versatile environment in which established and emerging artists conduct, exhibit and perform new and site-specific work

For a group with only a single year –and-a-half old 12” to their name, the Invisible Conga People have maintained an unnaturally pervasive foothold in my consciousness. I find myself spinning (well…digitally spinning, I don’t have a turntable) “Cable Dazed” as regularly now as when it came out last Februrary…which is to say: pretty damn regularly. Justin Simon and Eric Tsai make music with a little bit of guitar, a little bit of vocals, and a huge assortment of analog equipment, much of which has been personally modified, circuit-bent, or otherwise cracked with purpose. I’ve been fruitlessly checking their myspace every month or two for quite some time now, hoping and failing to find a little info suggesting that a follow-up might be in the works (though, finally, as of last week, a new 12” has been announced -- slated for release sometime next summer) so, needless to say, I was thrilled to discover a half-hour set of new music (at least new to my ears) in the ISSUE archives this week.

In a fluid set of continuous music, ICP spool out a hauntingly mesmerizing performance of muted intricacy. This is not so much dance music as the strains of memories of minimal house gingerly reconstituted in a dimly lit room, cavernous and empty. Though seemingly all sounds are run through pedals and processors to varyingly transformative and alien effect, a faint but undeniable glow of humanness remains -- a lonely streak of soul shivering amidst an ever-stretching field of cold, restrained beauty. While the tone is immediately assimilable and the atmosphere remains frozen in a timeless haze, the emotion possesses a quiet complexity inviting endless probing (though melancholy seems an undeniable component). The music itself reflects a similar balance of intricate construction and monochromatic affect – one may either allow the small parts to drift and blur into a singular wash of sound or slowly pull out the fragile components from the bottomless depths of the composition – disembodied vocals, soft eruptions of distortion, slow cascades of arpeggiated synth, groaning bass, calmly droning drum machines... even the comfortingly static hum of amplified equipment. If a lone 12” could provide 18 or so month of stimulation, this 30 minute set can surely last us til next summer.