One of my favorite records in 2015 was Craig Scott’s Lobotomy’s last full-length, “War is a Racket” (still available at Scott’s Bandcamp). There’s still nothing quite like that album. You have your progressive rock albums that take sophisticated, sinewy figures and sometimes incorporate sections of supercharged improvisation, and then you have your collage/montage mega-edited records that unearth surprising new sonic territory from cleverly manipulated bits of recorded sound, but rarely do these disciplines overlap they way they do in the work of Craig Scott.

And how do you follow such a singular record? As Scott began to prepare for his next project, he found himself somewhat hindered by the cost of nice microphones and studio outboard gear, so before he laid down a note, he took a little time to learn how to build his own analog (and sometimes digital) gear. Along the way, he started building devices to play “machine music,” too, modifying instruments to be MIDI-controlled. These are no small feats: consider how many folks spend a lifetime just refining a handful of microphone designs. In the world of Craig Scott, making his own hi-fi gear, or building his own MIDI contraptions to realize bits of music that blur the lines between human and machine just becomes another part of the music-making practice.

All of this leads to the latest album under the “Craig Scott’s Lobotomy” brand, the singular “I Am Revolting.” The title, of course, and its classic double entendre, holds the pair of keys to getting inside this album. Scott is actively revolting against the standard business practices of the music industry, from building his own recording and postproduction equipment, to building his own record lathe (you can get a single from the album cut into leftover copies of “War is a Racket” CDs), even cheekily nipping at streaming audio by uploading a “single” from the record to Spotify that’s buried under a conversation about the company’s own exploitative business practices. And some with more conventional tastes may find Scott’s music somewhat “revolting” as well, a phenomenon he entertains with song titles such as “It Sounds Like You Had Fun Making It.” 

Once you dig into this music, it becomes obvious that the novel aspects of this music are not “novelty,” and Scott’s amused self-deprecation aside, he’s playing with some intense and often serious ideas here, like John Oswald on a self-trepanation kick. The title track opens up the album with some fairly difficult music, sounding almost random at first. Percussion skitters in every direction as sparse piano notes in an upper register gradually outline a thematic melody. Nearly halfway through, the chaos coalesces into a (relatively) more structured section with rich string orchestration. And one of my favorite things about this piece is Scott’s use of space–there are perfectly-placed hesitations in the craziness, and sudden shifts in density that offer great contrasts and a bit of humor.

We get some stringed instrument fun on “Surfing or Drowning,” along with the madcap percussion. This is the point in the album where I start to focus on the “human vs machine” elements of this music: presumably some of the sounds we’re hearing are coming through his MIDI-fueled machine music contraptions, which include percussion and stringed instruments. What I find interesting to ponder is how Scott turns the notion of “machine music” being a cold, rigid kind of music-making on its head. The machines may be accepting some “cold” MIDI input as marching orders, but the way they’re cobbled together seems to allow for some looseness in playback. They sound very “human” in that sense, marching ahead but not perfectly so.

These complementary opposites of apparent chaos and order, perfection and messiness, beauty and harshness, and density and stillness, continue to spar with one another playfully throughout all five pieces. It’s a short record, clocking in around a half-hour, but there is so much to unpack here that this feels like the right length. The last track, “Sounds Like You Had Fun Making It,” works as a crazed extended cadenza to what has come before: brass instruments come to the foreground to lead this hyperedited ensemble through a series of wild stylistic jumps, occasional lurches in tempo, and periodic punctuations of a crowd applauding. Is the crowd encouraging this maniacal melee to go on, or is it that terse, dismissive kind of applause one sometimes hears when the crowd is uncomfortable? Sometimes it seems like things could go either way, but inclusion of such interruptions in a piece like this brings me back to those issues of technology and humanity. This music reaches into lots of weird places connected to technology, old and new, analog and digital, but it has important roots in humanity nonetheless.

My takeaway from this very unusual album is that Scott manages to both expose and embody this weird moment in history we find ourselves living through–the album, like our culture, is quite a mess in many places, but within that mess, there is a lot of true beauty, melancholy, and humor living there, those elements of the human experience that define who or even what we are. And even as we live amongst so many machines and increasingly-automated parts of our daily lives, our machines only perform as well as we build and program them. They’re very “smart,” but also a little loose in the head sometimes, just like us. “I Am Revolting” feels like an album of etudes on several levels–the pieces are studies for Scott’s new working methods, but they feel like the aural embodiment of etudes toward navigating through our lives right now, too.

You can pick up the album digitally, or there are just a few copies left available on a USB flash drive adorned with a concrete brain (a nice compliment to the plush rubberized-brain flash drive edition of his previous album). The flash drive version includes some other cool audio treasures from several of Scott’s other working projects, and if this music leaves you feeling a little unmoored, I’d suggest orienting yourself first with bits of music from those. It’ll all come into focus.

The whole album drops on Feb 12 (in Euro calendar parlance, a nice palindrome date of 12/02/2021), and you can find the first single on the Bandcamp page below.