There are a lot of dark colors in the artwork, yet it feels warm and inviting. Which makes it perfect for this album, which is completely electronic but feels warm and human and alive. In my notes, "warm" shows up over and over again, as does "gorgeous" or some variation on it.
I was mostly right about Cryteria; it is indeed heavily electronic and never aggressive. It sounds nothing like Poe though, Heather Duff ensconced herself completely behind the curtain and when she sings it's through. . . I don't know if it's through a vocoder, or a computer-generated voice program or both or what, but the vocals are all electronically treated. She even created male vocals for some songs, including a duet on Momotarou, which, incidentally, is in Japanese, as is The Dancing Girl of Izu, My Resonance, and, I think, Metaphysical Preferences. I don't speak the language myself but I at least know "arigato" which I picked out of My Resonance and given Duff's clear fascination with Japan and the Japanese musical motifs in Momotaru and Dancing Girl I think it's a legit supposition.
Speaking of said motifs, they're just one part of Duff's fabulous variety of sounds. Some one person projects show their lack of exterior input in repetition but rhed shows a composer in love with all the sonic possibilities that her machines offer. Mario's Meltdown has an intro that sounds like a Speak N' Spell, Momotarou augments its Japan-influenced composition with Japanese drums (I don't know if they're taiko or what, but they're definitely Japanese), Fallen has what sounds like a bowed acoustic bass, there's an electric harpsichord in It's Only Logical, My Resonance features zippy synths not heard elsewhere that are a perfect fit for its uptempo rush. . .you get the idea. I think that Duff plays keys--many varieties represented--and everything else is electronically generated.
Nor is it just a clump of interesting sounds. Duff is an excellent composer; over and over again she weaves her tracks into songs in a way that makes every piece sound perfectly integrated without ever feeling mechanical. She shows a real ear for rhythm too, most prominently with Momotarou's syncopated drums that keep the feel loose despite their unvarying programmed precision.
On one listen it was hard to really catch the words, even when they were in English. There's no lyrics sheet and most of the time the vocals are so electronically treated that they're hard to make out--as the presence of several instrumental tracks indicates, rhed privileges sound over statement. They're most intelligible on If there was a God. The song doesn't break any ground in atheist thought (if G-d exists why do people suffer, even really religious people who pray all the time; we know what's right and wrong all by ourselves, that sort of thing) but the vocals are childlike and set against a pretty piano melody turning the plainspokeness into a sonically coherent virtue.
If you can't tell, I'm really happy I picked this up.
On to what the rest of the world knows about it, the thrilling, live, without a net portion of this blog. First stop as always is Discogs, and while there are a surprising number of hits for both rhed and Cryteria, they got nothing. rhed only shows up as parts of various names and what appears to be a visual artist who capitalizes the R--their one credit is design for a comp CD. Cryteria's been adopted as a band name by several people, but no one else named an album that. There's a Heather Duff in there too, but going by her one credit I feel confident in saying they're not the same person.
It's tough to find info on rhed in the wider world, especially since apparently Madonna's son has been painting under that name and, as you might expect, pages on that hog a lot of search results. But I did locate her Bandcamp page. I'm not surprised she's from Phoenix; a lot of these discs are going to be self-releases and the most obscure ones will probably be local. I'm also not surprised at her bio: "Hihi, I'm a neoclassical musician inspired by Japan, and I sometimes use Vocaloid." Oh, and I was pretty much right about the release date; Cryteria dropped on 12/30/16. I managed to miss a YouTube page again, but unlike with Bear Ghost there isn't the embarrassment of the entire album sitting there, just four tracks, only one of which is on the disc (and it looks like it might be an alternate version).
She's got a Soundcloud page too, which offers both a photo (yup, she does look like that) and some newer tracks I need to take a listen to. The one thing that isn't anywhere is information on what ANN is (rhed's themes are nice little pieces, incidentally). As you might imagine, Googling it is a nightmare. IMDB surprisingly less so, but it doesn't seem to be any of the results I got. Anyone out there know what's up?
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