Mr. Bill
Apophenia

Apophenia is the tendency to perceive connections between things that are actually independent.

Certainly a rather pretentious title for the latest release from Mr. Bill. But the thirty-one-year-old Australian producer has never "settled for mediocrity" (to quote the title of another of his albums) and has constantly expanded the boundaries of his personal conception of music, without worrying too much about the accessibility of his pieces.

In doing so, he has gained a fair reputation in the field of so-called "intelligent" electronic music, thanks in part to impeccable production and an obsessive attention to detail.

This "Apophenia" comes shortly after the release of a collaboration between the bearded Bill and the EDM giant deadmau5 and the subsequent signing of the Australian to the Canadian's label, mau5trap. A record, then, quite anticipated both by long-time fans of Mr. Bill and by those who only approached him thanks to the song produced four-handed with the Mau5.

The eponymous first track is - in effect - a collage of seemingly disconnected sections, united only by a melancholic and vaguely unsettling mood. Apophenia, as was said.

The key to best understanding this album is precisely to abandon oneself to the apophenic illusion, to independently connect the more melodic fragments with the more rhythmic ones, almost always dominated by complex drum patterns and interspersed with perfectly controlled glitches.

What emerges first is the enormous variety of the pieces, which surprises without undermining the cohesiveness of the work. Indeed, it ranges from the jazz suggestions of "Composite 4" to the more regular and danceable "Corot-7b", from the acoustic instrumentation (albeit clearly synthesized) peeking out in "Jesus Christ Superstar" and "Jtrs Vibe" to the dark and menacing atmosphere of the electronic pattern that opens "Ladder Anxiety."

What amazes is the ease with which Mr. Bill seems to juggle unconventional melodies and hypnotic and indecipherable rhythms. A perfect example of this is "Sisyphus", a track introduced by a melancholic piano, which explodes without warning in the central section, when the drumming becomes more intense and the tempo of the piece doubles, before calming down in what is a sort of drop, naturally flowing into the piano melody that repeats at the end.

But much more than the purely technical and virtuosic moments, which seem only to reaffirm how skillful Bill is at shaping dry and complex glitch-based rhythms (particularly the tedious "Composite 12" and "Cryptomnesia"), it is the sweet melodies entrusted to keyboards and various synthesizers that emerge, capable of creating an environment where the listener is delicately transported piece by piece. Notable in this sense are "Ejecta" and "Option Paralysis" (in which - among other things - remarkable vocal chops from Katy Perry's "Bon Appetit" are noteworthy).

A special mention goes to the chameleon-like "Jesus Christ Superstar", which starts with a jazz-rock instrumentation and then opens into an almost nocturnal parenthesis led by a muted acoustic guitar and definitively wins us over with the melancholic synths that appear in the last two minutes.

Overall, a multifaceted work, difficult to digest but almost revelatory for the writer, which once again shows - if there was ever a need - this artist's desire to experiment, not a true revolutionary but certainly an innovator in the field of glitch music, with personality to spare and creativity that is out of the ordinary.