Stephen Bishop, under his Basic House moniker, originally released Caim In Bird Form on his own Opal Tapes label, which thereafter got the vinyl treatment from Digitalis Records. The album reflects the mission of his label as a purveyor of dilletantism and textural discovery. Bishop’s logic here is equal parts playful and cerebral; technical musicality inherently veers away from a true notion experimentalism. How can we call a piece of music that’s been calculated and overdubbed and mixed down an experiment anymore? His solution is to keep the arrangement minimal and draw our attention to the sounds of the recorded medium slowly pummeling, melting, and gouging at the instrumentation.

“I don’t remember acid,” is the percussive equivalent of wax beaten with a two by four; the upper spectrum of drum blows mutate into tones, and the lower end gets pounded into a gluey bass detritus. “TV Illness” captures the tangible sounds of an angelic drone reverberating and rustling through a ceramic room. Bishop sums up his sound best in an interview with Sonic Router, “When you get high in the toilets at clubs and you can hear the music from the main room but it’s reflected by the tiled walls and floor and all the sounds of communication and sex and hand dryers and stuff. This is what I’m thinking about with Basic House. It’s the middle ground between the dancefloor and toilet bowl.”

Buy it on wax here.