Richard Devine

Conventional-wisdom types often damn electronic music as cold and inhuman, but they have no idea until they listen to Richard Devine. This Georgia prodigy’s astounding sound design achieves unparalleled summits of complexity and density. For those who find Autechre’s recent output too straightforward, check out Asect:Dsect, Devine’s third full-length for Schematic. Like Autechre, Devine abstracts electro into a Tourette’s danse macabre, leaving a vestige of party-rockin’ funk in its DNA. His beats clack like the dentures of coke-addled auctioneers while moving in meters that would thrill calculus profs. Devine’s music traps the listener in a microbial miasma of gurgles, hisses, clanks and insectoid mandible chatter. Consequently, fatigue can set in (Devine’s convolutions have convolutions), but if you want to hear an evil genius magicking his computers, it doesn’t get any wickeder than this.