Three Legged Race: Rope Commercial Vol. 1

Rather fittingly, Three Legged Race’s Rope Commercial, Vol. 1 seems to be more about the aesthetics of the product itself rather than the music contained therein. On its site, Underwater Peoples devotes more space to describing the album’s physical presentation than the music of Three Legged Race. This could be seen as understandable in that there’s little to nothing to describe other than, like the music itself, a vague notion of a retro-futurist dystopia, presumably subterranean, given the album’s propensity for mechanized drips and eerie synthetic reverberations.

Beyond a few random bursts of human interference via scrambled radio signals, there is very little hope that the futuristic landscape evoked here will have much room for us. It’s an alienating aural world of repetition, subtlety and very little of the traditional notion of form and function required to hold one’s undivided attention. Ultimately, little here goes anywhere, nor does it serve to create anything beyond a vaguely unsettling mood, evoking little to no visceral or emotional response from the listener. It’s sonic wallpaper from some distant, unpleasant age.