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The Flight Orchestra

The Military of Fatima

(Breathing Room; US: 21 Aug 2006; UK: Unavailable)

From Southern California comes David Wilson, AKA The Flight Orchestra, the newest in a line of laptop-wielding electronic artists strongly rooted in a fascination with “human electronic” music. (Remember Fennesz? Khonnor?) Unfortunately, the human element on The Military of Fatima arrives solely in the form of Wilson’s disarmingly vulnerable, fey vocals, often sitting atop the glitchy, paper-thin soundscapes as if tacked on as an afterthought (“Win One for the Endless Empire and the Neverending Day”, for example, a start-stop exercise in industrial noise that sums up everything irritating about the album). “How Fast the Fast Fast with Trepidation” is a rare highlight: the melody is given some room to build amid the speaker-hopping bleeps, bloops, and one-note synths that more closely resemble the warning sounds my car makes when the door’s still open. Ultimately, the short, utterly tuneless interludes only drag the album further, ensuring that The Flight Orchestra remains firmly landed.

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Zach Schonfeld currently attends Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT, birthplace of Das Racist, MGMT, and the nineteenth-century respiration calorimeter. He serves as managing editor of Wesleying, a popular student-life blog, and arts editor of the twice-weekly Wesleyan Argus, organizing the occasional noise rock show in between. In his spare time, he enjoys visiting presidential birthplaces and scowling at split infinitives.


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