Joakim Forsgren

Synapse is the first single off (and a sort of appendix before the fact to) Autorhythm's project Songs For The Nervous System that culminates in an album later this spring. It has a driving and asymmetric “Can meets John Bender”-like quality paired with a warm soundscape reminiscent of Cluster's Zuckerseit. The ambient B side Oxytocin features a recording of a Soviet era Ocean 209 transistor radio that adds to the ethereal other worldly dimension of this beautifully languid neo-Kosmische gem.

Except for mixing and minor adjustments the music was made wholly without computers, and Autorhythm’s Joakim Forsgren pushes his vintage synths out of their comfort zones in the same way that Captain Beefheart and Miles Davis did their musicians. Conventional sounds and solutions have been consciously avoided, but still there is a sense of effortlessness to the music, like it couldn’t have been done in another way. Like it's mainstream pop music for a dysfunctional but beautiful parallel world. While in no way a retro project, this music nevertheless conjures an era when electronic music was still a new and undefined field, and at times captures that same elusive feeling of promise and wonder that pioneering artists like Mort Garson, Bruce Haack and Delia Derbyshire did, before conventions taught us the correct way to create, exploit and consume electronica.