Sacramento’s Michael RJ Saalman makes some very futuristic pop music. It is kind of like someone programmed a super computer to write a load of pop songs, and it processed music over the past 60 years to shoot out his latest release Lxus Shaq. Composed of live samples, instrument sounds, electronic drums, and sporadic time changes, these songs are layered with complexities. The vocals themselves sound like the latest in a long line of operating systems that have developed human emotion. In Lxus Shaq, Saalman trims most of the fat of any normal pop song and replaces it with cyborg parts.
As robotic as most of the songs are, they also create a deep sentimentality that cover a wide range of human emotion. The best example of this cyborg pop is the album’s closing track, “Practicing Romantics”. This song samples a very human Spanish acoustic guitar, while surrounding it with robotic and space-like sounds. One of them being an ascending synthesizer, best described as the bionic man sound. Together, the contrasting human and computerized sounds make for a beautiful love song that travels 30 years into the future.
You may know Saalman from his past moniker Woman Year or his current group Biosexual, but this latest release is under his own name. You can purchase the Lxus Shaq here, via Crash Symbols, as well as stream the new album below.
