Click, clack, flip-flap. Bits with bits with bits making a full track. An army of cuts, microsamples working together as a dreamteam once again. Here is the papercut, cardboard, concrete electronic producer back on Goldmin with six more tracks! Exactly the right amount and just as many tracks as his previous "Post-Techno Crisis" Ep contained. What is great with accurate and dedicated producers like Frank Bogdanowitz aka Dr. Nojoke is that they simply never stop making tracks, never loosing their relevance, sometimes making a typical Nojoke-like tracks where you reckon that he hasnt taken too much risk at innovating but just made another perfect cut, and sometimes you hear something a bit different with a rythmical signature that is not too common over his discography although one way or another, the tracks are being built, sculpted, exported, refined sometimes but the process just goes on like in a neverending factory where the workers only stop to recover and sleep. As a label, it makes it easy as you know the man will always have something new to let you hear, but it also makes it difficult to make a choice among the new material as it requires a sort of digestion when you manage to listen twenty new tracks in the row. Plus, Nojoke tracks' elements are not things that should be taken for their aesthetic value in themselves, being quite neutral, atonal but rather for their utility in the whole track. This is perhaps what makes this very particular and personal form of electronic music in general (and especially Frank's way of turning it) much more closer to various forms of contemporary music than it is close to house music. No bright pad here, not much break (or very sober if there is one), no drops... Someone who would listen a Nojoke track's remix parts one by one wouldn't have much fun. The building blocks of these tracks are truly raw material, like matches assembled together to make one bigger block which we happen to call a track. That's why these few tracks, in addition to another few tracks, and in regard to the rest of his discography becomes a collection where each track is connected to several others, not the same way that Terrence Dixon works for example (his music being more of a mise-en-abime where a one bar loop can be resampled and bring a whole new track), but perhaps much closer to the way a discography like Ricardo Villalobos' one is made. Track after track, click after click, an edifice that keeps on growing day by day and where each track adds it's own redifinition of the actual same definition. Of course, this doesn't mean that Frank's track are not self-sufficient. They are not bad dj tools or the soundtrack of basic youtube tutorials explaining how to make a beat with field-recorded sounds. His tracks are completely mastered works showing a long time experience, each track standing for itself. But it is an interesting thing to do to compare how discographies of artists are made. Running a label makes it even clearer and also allows to write about it. What happens is that one writing a text can quickly be bored with the metaphors, the hyperbolic adjectives and every superlatives comparing music to this or that, then one should be looking for something else. This is perhaps what happened to Nojoke quite quickly with the overused musical themes as well: you don't hear much marvellous synths nor much harmonies in his music, no big scenarized breaks, not much unexpected things but a lot to expect regarding the drums, the very details of these drums (however they might be made). Self-made drums becoming pads, keys, effects, in fact. And self-made clicks, bleeps and tricks filling every single gap of what an electronic track is usually made of. It feels like a Dr. Nojoke track is like having music under a microscope, like hearing something zommed-in and sometimes zoomed-out where the listener kind of has a very bright viewing angle on what's happening musicwise, like a map showing how the track is made and what the track contains. Like if through a magnifying glass, the track was made to be illustrating it's own composition process. This way, Nojoke is doing a mise-en-abime too but his very own way. And it is a tricky process to analyze these tracks as the closer you get, the further it goes. This can be explained by several facts, which are all related to this quite formal minimalistic electronic music's roots like micro-sampling, layering, grain modulation and such things. And of course, music being a substance in movement and a mobile thing, that magnified picture is never too clear, always sort of blurry. Indeed, in a typical Nojoke's track, a hand bumping a table can be used as one half or like ten percent of an actual hat, or a snare, or a kick. And in between the kick and the snare (if we are talking about a basic 4/4 rhytmical pattern), a lot can happen, some very audible things and some quite hardly audible ones. All is connected but at micro level. And onle when zooming out, at a macro level, a track appears and it lengths eight or nine minutes, but these eight or nine minutes are often contained in just few seconds. Rest is modulation, bit of arrangement and improvisation. Though so much things can be done during these very few seconds! Dr. Nojoke is a master at showing that, just like Villalobos and early Monolake are. Their music is like a justification to itself, sounding like an acoustic response to the principles of loop and repetition. On this new ep, Acryl is perhaps a standalone track, one that is quite dubby in a way, more aerial and less focused on "clicks and cuts", yet it is faithful to it's principles and to the artist who made it: a musical control-freak who doesn't let much run out of his circle but who lets so much happens in this circle that every new release of him is a good reason to be happy! "Beats out of bits" could be a good ep title but Frank has chosen "Alma Ata Oum" for this one, a one-sentence-poem that he wrote, and most definitely another great collection of this artist's evergrowing collection.