DIY▲PYЯΛMID
Yosemeti Fail EP

2015

The following sentence sounds spectacularly mundane, but the way it is phrased by the artist himself gives it a certain tongue-in-cheek edge that also runs as a golden thread through the work that is presented on this very page: "2 fatal macbook pro osx yosemeti crashes resulted in the loss of 2 1/2 albums and $150 in damages had to replace the hard drive this ep is the healing process of dealing with the loss of data////instead of backing up to an external, uploaded to bandcamp so it is safe now." These words of wisdom are uttered by one Michael Green, better known in musical New Age, Vaporwave and Cyberpunk circles as DIY▲PYЯΛMID. The way the above catastrophe is uttered makes it somewhat funny, and that is exactly the artistic intension: puissance in lieu of pity, that’s the credo of the day which is poured into the lacunar ventricles of the digital three-track Yosemeti Fail EP, self-released on Bandcamp and available to stream and fetch over there. It is en vogue to mock Apple for every new OS X installment, with many people hailing their Snow Leopard version as the final ultimate desktop/laptop operating system to behold. I’m sure that Michael Green can relate, as he even mocks the correct spelling of Yosemite. What’s happening in Yosemeti Fail is so unlike the net artist’s adventures in Second Life or his vernissages of digital goods: murkiness and anger-fueled aridity hail at first, but the EP progresses, hits all the right synapses and fires on all cylinders candela-wise when the finale is nigh. Here is a closer look at the work of one of Portland’s craziest – that’s a big compliment – artists.

Everything is set and done right at the beginning, the blame has been pinpointed, the accusation made, the artistic assignment of guilt proclaimed: the opener Yosemeti Fail is so utterly important a recrimination that it is the title track of DIY▲PYЯΛMID’s dissipative EP. But where’s the hate, the hapticity of violence, the ribcage or carcass? Since we talk about an operating system in general and music in particular, you can only grasp – and grab – the concepts theoretically, by means of the mind’s cervical parts. Only consequentially, Yosemeti Fail launches in medias res, with its alkaloidal blister punctilio firmly in place. Arpeggiated and shredded, the titration of the bittersweet anger turns sour when the highest tone frequencies protrude the diffractive cesspool like scintillating chlorostorms. Beats are only insinuated, rhythms injected due to the demotic/demonic dualism of the rotoscoping melody. Amidst the tetragonal megafauna, however, there’s a soothing legato ecomorph, providing spherical helixes and the suprematism of one DIY artist who is tortured by technical errors but overcomes them with the colloidal guardian light that illumines the inimical nematodes. An iconoclastic gateway.

Follow-up B4 Internet is yet another exercise in abhorrence and disdain, encapsulated in nostalgic sentiment. The time before the internet comprised solely of hieratic halcyon days, with real people spawning real verbiage and amphibology aplenty. That Michael Green’s beloved Second Life universe is kept alive via the internet is not lost to the artist’s epistemological endeavor, and so the second track offers another chirality of yearning and honest-to-goodness anger. Partially sharing the tiled-segregated physiognomy with the opener, B4 Internet is another peritoneum of vesiculating bubbles and chopped fermions. This time, however, the bystander is enshrined in a pressure chamber in an ocean of quasi-salubrious viscidity. Indeed, it is the reverb and echo which allow the perception of a strange wideness which mobs up the immediacy and omnipresence of the hard-hitting hollow blebs, causing an oxyomornic superimposition of confining capaciousness. Despite the mephitic thermal immersion scent, there’s bioluminescence in this dungeon, a somewhat soothing stratiform magnanimity that is amicable and benignant as can be in the given circumstances. That the listening subject is alloyed with strychnine and potassium is one possible punchline alright, but at least the alkaliphilic fibroblasts are sweet and gentle.

The opener Yosemeti Fail showcases a mis-chromosomed zoetrope, B4 Internet a similar but benthic kaleydoscope, so the closer #Redemption is probably another chemical compound of molten metallicity, right? Nope, and the track title already gives you the answer. DIY▲PYЯΛMID accepts the fate of lost music, becomes a stronger man and advertizes debonair cenobitism of the droning kind in the grand finale of approximately six minutes. In lieu of violent fusillades, a certain sarcopenia has set in, soothing the soul, easing the mind. Having previously been featured on a Vapor Vertebrae edition in May 2015, the allure of Michael Green’s adiabatic rivulet still rings true: being part of – and current endpoint to – the artistic healing process, #Redemption is more than a hashtag. It is a telomere of light, the lachrymose adjuvant that unties the Gordian knot and crushed the gridlock. The artist reaches futuristic New Age mountains, with futuristic lasers, pulsatile muons and galactic gluons readily augmenting the baroclinic boundaries of one’s sensorial apprehension. While it is true that the attached bleepfest can be seen as a pernicious counterpoint to the sumptuous incandescence of the diaphanous drone diorama, the plinks and blips are still health-giving arabesques, unexpectedly streamlined and glittering, tidally flexing all the way before the end is nigh.

DIY▲PYЯΛMID’s Yosemeti Fail EP is comparatively easy to explain, as literary comparisons are close at hand: it’s a robinsonade, an odyssey, a walk from the Stygian abyss into the light of day. The aural transformation of these literary concepts, however, is what makes or breaks the short ride. It is true that Michael Green uses the momentum of the day to erect ill-colored circulators and gravitational redshifts filled with loathing and rancor, but the level of anger itself is never allowed to fully take over a song, no matter the violent flaring. Things are balanced out after all, leaving foveae and blind spots on the way, but still succumbing to the accretion of light in lieu of crestfallen darkness. As the EP progresses, the plasticity grows: at first a desiccate-calcined affair, then a mucoid cytoplasm, finally a sun-dappled panorama, the Yosemeti Fail EP extrapolates the classical triple jump with the aid of a multinucleate triptych. Those who favor the artist’s over-the-top cryovolcanism will be a tad disappointed to see it amiss in the given surroundings. However, technocratic visions and contrapuntal doubts are seeded as surrogates and displacements, harkening back to the superionic – or was that ironic? – industrialism of DIY▲PYЯΛMID’s dark purple V O L U M Ξ T R I X X (2014), and that’s worth quite a lot in my book!

Further listening and reading: 

• Yosemeti Fail EP is available to stream and fetch (name your price) at Bandcamp. 
• Follow Michael Green’s hilarious – and occasionally appalling – adventures on Second Life, or see pictorial roundups on Twitter: @metadiamonds

Vaporwave Review 088: DIY PYRAMID – Yosemeti Fail EP (2015). Originally published on Jun. 2, 2015 at AmbientExotica.com.