Genre: Noisy Games

01 Extraordinary
02 Timeless
03 Phantasia
04 Interior Designs

Is pacifying a compliment? Assuming it is, one wonders, on what order of straightforwardness? And in relation to music bound to be described as noise? Is weakness, chosen, power?

Jessica Rylan (who also records as Can’t)’s Interior Designs lingers, suspended in a refusal of sonic sentences, on this uncertain threshold of pacifying and unsettling. Interior spaces, sparsely cluttered, where boundaries oscillate between inside and outside, the domestic and public, finicky arrangements for that uncertain atmosphere where one’s ostensible plans for the self boil down to knickknacks and furniture and posters presented as performances for others. Her music makes similar slips and twists; it’s soothing in its crescendos of a form that hangs glacially, almost independent of the sounds themselves - in the walls of the house, the frames of the pictures, the knotted wood of the furniture. The protective elements that project an alluring calm, that state ordered arrangement, spatiality controlled. But then there are the fuzzy splinters that whisper unease as the sounds deposited themselves along form’s creaking flight. Intruders, but also invited visitors into the pacifying, painstakingly arranged domestic space, a record as home for the heart and head. Those friends who never seem to leave spaces the way they found them, but who also never alter a discernable element, simply the air.

Rylan’s work seem reminiscent of what Aimee Bender did for short stories a few years ago – not so much a feminization or a return to childish simplicity, but a merging of the two to present a constant state of a questioning. A state of investigation, what has been described in relation to Rimbaud as an “attitude of inquiry”, where answers themselves are not seen as ends, but permutations. And then there’s the last track, a droopy, sick (as in queasy) guitar added to the curdling homemade synthesizers found on the rest of the CD. Mimicking (to me) the turning of personalities inside out online - public as private to the easy erasure of both – that asks through its odd beats but non-aggressive shrug of ill green notes, when will out of tune finally become in tune? Or has it, here, again – in a exploration, one that thinks it craves the pacifying but knows it doesn’t and so then trips over it – or kicks it: counteracting the outside, where the supporting structures are no longer trying to order or pacify (if they did), where content now assumes and holds without question that mundanely comforting role.