Supercollider

Supercollider’s debut album remains one of the most remarkable, unusual efforts of whatever could be termed alternative rock in the broadest sense from the early 1990s – it wasn’t simply at odds with what the term would become, it was almost at odds with nearly everything else around it in general. For a couple of years beforehand, the Long Beach-based duo of Michael Horton and Phillip Haut steadily built out ideas in demos and live performances based around a combination of vocals and brisk, cyclical and nervous guitar from Horton and Haut’s percussion and sampler and sequencer use, creating an austere, entrancing sound – “Sooner” makes for an intense example – that felt like much of the modernist poetry and art that they claimed as inspiration as much as music in and of itself. Horton’s softly yearning vocals could almost be of the high lonesome type appearing here in another context, finding a striking warmth on songs like “Program” and the lengthy, understatedly stirring epic “Pedestrian” against the focused precision of the music. Standard verse-chorus structures are sometimes eschewed, other times made more subtly strange in feeling as on “Aluminum,” while the crisp rhythms from Haut, as “Dimmer” shows very elegantly, add to the album’s immediacy.