Judson “Tettix” Cowan describes Finest Designs, his new album of electronica, as a ‘throwback’ to his own earliest work. To those mostly familiar with game-influenced stuff like TKOEP and his fantastically savage remix of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, the surprise comes just a few seconds in, when Tettix’s trademark staccato percussion and bleepery is joined by new wavey vocals not heard since Conformatigmatic. “It’s a strong departure from my usual style,” Cowan said. “I felt like I owed to myself to explore singing on another album. It was easy to get complacent making video-gamey stuff, because it’s so easy to get attention on the internet with that sort of sound.”

In tracks like Simple Devices, Flicker and Finest
Designs, there’s a warmth and presence that often feels forced
in modern electronica, but here it’s well-blended with the
hardness of the underlying sound. Though the lyrics (and their
delivery) are languid and reverberant, that’s not to say this
is a downbeat LP: there’s a lot of fun to be had in Fucking
Robots (a collaboration with Dana Swanson) and Hothlanta, a
driven techno-pop number that recalls everything good about the
1980s, from the Human League to shoot-em-up soundtracks by
Chris Huelsbeck. “It’s a scary thing, putting your voice into a
song for everyone else to hear. It’s always been much easier
for me to put an instrumental in front of someone to listen
than it has been a vocal song. Closer to the heart, perhaps?
More personal?”” Cowan’s process is likely familiar to people
who create music without a large budget: his simple set-up is a
Mac, a MIDI controller keyboard, and a mic connected via a
firewire interface: “I work solely in software. I used to have
a bunch of hardware — a triton, a JP-8000, a Microwave XT –
but I scrapped it all when I got Reason,” a powerful
music-making program by Propellerheads. Reason was recently
joined by a companion app called Record, together creating a
suite useful both for creating electronic music and recording
real-world vocals and instruments to go with it. “For once, I
could do everything in the same place, which made way for
creativity,” Cowan said. “Less hassle means that it’s easier to
dive right in. So I just plink around on the keyboard for a
bit, building a synth that sounds nice, then sing along while I
work out the melody. I program it all into the sequencer, then
hop in the laundry closet and record some vocals.” It usually
takes him a night or two to write a song, but weeks to tweak
and master it until he’s happy with the results. Finest
Designs, like Tettix’s previous work, is free of charge to
download and made available under a Creative Commons license.
You can donate at Paypal at the Download
page [Tettix.net]