Last time we heard about Neil Reinalda, the man was living in Baltimore's Open Space gallery, founding the People's Higher Order of Royal Kinship, a.k.a. PHORK. Since then, he's moved to Los Angeles, but he's kept the moniker and is releasing a new tape, Discrepancies, on August 14, on our beloved NNA Tapes (who appear to have been laying low for the summer, so it's nice to see that they are back with new releases! Yay!). PHORK is a delicate still life of mellow, trancy beat music. It's almost like a still-life of dance; every single wooden box tap and arrhythmic hiss sounds placed just-so. You can easily imagine Neil, awash in the bliss of his organic process, hovering his cursor over a track in Pro-Tools, inching it slowly to the left, slowly to the right, until it is exactly where it is supposed to be.
There is a high-pitched flange that hovers above the beat, as the percussion gradually grows out of control. This might seem preposterous, but this song reminds me of a piece of art called Spiral Jetty, by Robert Smithson, which is built into the Great Salt lake in Utah. The stones are placed under the water and built into a spiral shaped hillock, and the water washes over them, exposing and covering the actual construction as the seasons and evaporation periods flow. PHORK has built a hillock of a beat, and as the water tones evaporate, we hear more and more of the movement of the stones below.
