BMA Magazine Albums of 2011, Com Truise – Galactic Melt

With another year without a Boards of Canada release the synth-heavy mind music landscape was traversed by New Jersey’s fabulously named Com Truise, who gleefully peppered the grounds with blips, beeps, scrapes and snares as he went. With Galactic Melt the keyboard obsessed Truise takes us on a trippy skip through his synth museum, delivering an album akin to spinning through 2001 A Space Odyssey’s psychedelic ‘through the infinite’. In short, it’s music to stare off into space and blissfully vague out to. Describing himself as producing “mid-fi synth-wave, slow motion funk”, Seth “Truise” Haley has created something truly mesmerising; music that paradoxically uses all the hallmarks of the‘80s – synths, 808 drums, more synths – to create something futuristic. Yes, Haley’s sound smacks of Boards – with its cloudy synths and crackling snares VHS Sex sounds like a BoC B-side – but Haley has crafted his own synthy beast that’s more uplifting in tone. Brokendate, with its driving, insistent low synth stabs, steady punch-beat and soaring high synths should lure you into Truise's Chuch of Synth. And one listen to Flightwave will have you converted; the high-hats at the 3:44 mark get me every time. As a Twitter fan said recently “@comtruise live is like finding yourself in Tron’s Grid and having a drummer follow you around. Wow.” That sums it up nicely.