Various Artists: Nanoloop 1.0

While glitch techno has been oppressively tied to advances in software design, the genre's past two years have been marked by a notable turn away from slavish devotion to process. Driven both by the realities of easy accessibility and by a heartening desire for democratization, the scene's most promising artists have been plying the glitch method as a means rather than an end, building vastly different structures from a formula originally revered for its blueprint-like reduction. Nowhere is that more apparent than on Nanoloop 1.0, a compilation that ups its personality quotient by setting the barrier for entry as low as it can go. Toying with a music-making cartridge designed for the Nintendo Game Boy, the album's artists turn out strikingly singular realizations of a premise all the more novel for its lack of seriousness. Most of the artists cheat by using additional editing software, but the best among them succeed by enlisting inherently annoying video-game sounds in a gameful rejection of the boundaries separating theory and practice. Oliver Wittchow, who designed the cartridge, twists the noises of laser-blasting fighter planes and bonus-point paydays into a minimal-techno banger on "Nanoloop." Dat Politics follows a similar line on "Richoux," an example of thinking-out-loud virtuosity that morphs from a corny carnival song into an arresting micro march. Mercifully, most of the tracks bear little resemblance to actual video games, but the Game Boy's bubbly pops and liquid dissolves tart up everything from Asciii's sine-wave ear-bleeder ("401K") to Merzbow's hymn to analog hum ("Untitled"). Boasting a sprawling range of artists—Blectum From Blechdom, Hrvatski, Pita, AGF/DLAY, and Stock, Hausen & Walkman, among others—Nanoloop 1.0 reaffirms the idea that lowbrow visions and brains share space under the same hat.