Giant Claw – Deep Thoughts
11.5.15 by Scott Scholz

Orange Milk’s Keith Rankin has dropped a serious grip of tapes as Giant Claw in the last half-decade. From the poly-prog of “Midnight Murder” to last year’s heavy foray into sample-based music with “DARK WEB”, Rankin is always up for new adventures. And with the new Giant Claw tape, we get a chance to peer directly between his ears and pluck out a fine set of “Deep Thoughts“.

“Deep Thoughts” is a significant departure sonically from “DARK WEB”, whose dominant R&B samples made the album a very percussion-driven affair. It’s quite different from earlier Giant Claw jams, too, which featured all kinds of funky synth tones and a fairly pianistic approach. The timbral palette of “Deep Thoughts” draws from mostly vanilla general MIDI tones, and there is little in the way of percussion. Instead, the focus is on the detailed compositions themselves, created by painstakingly entering notes directly into ye olde piano roll screen, and like you might expect of a digital corollary to Conlon Nancarrow’s player piano studies, the clean and simple sounds help you to focus directly on the wild arrangements themselves.

Conceptually, though, there is a fascinating relationship to sample-based music going on here: when Giant Claw was on tour with Darren Keen a few months ago, Rankin was talking about a concept of “soundfonts” that makes a lot of sense while jamming out to this tape. His “soundfont” concept is different than the old Creative Labs file format from the 90s. In this case, a “soundfont” is like the set of musical information that underlies the basics of a particular style or specific composer: the harmonic and melodic tendencies, the go-to rhythms, that sort of thing. You might have a piece that uses a Glass soundfont for the main section with a Gershwin soundfont in the outro, a Mozart soundfont, an Art of Noise soundfont. You can write through-composed music, using blocks of distinctive kinds of harmony, and the “soundfonts” behave much the same way that samples are used.

In “Deep Thoughts”, you’ll find that Giant Claw can acrobatically deploy almost as many soundfonts as there are general MIDI sounds to play them back with. These pieces plunder familiar flavors of harmony from throughout the 20th century and a few even earlier, deftly pulling them all into a unique, unified whole. And they’re not all “art music” (de)composers brought back to life in MIDI – many pieces, like my favorite, #09, nest their compositional complexity between opening/closing themes that sound like 80’s cop shows or game show themes. Commentary on the utility of “art music?” Aural critiques of appropriation in Western music history? Blurring the lines between sample-based and through-composed music? Deep Thoughts, indeed.

You can snag “Deep Thoughts” on cassette from the Giant Claw Bandcamp page right here, or if you’re into the compact discs, head to Virgin Babylon in Japan.