Trifecta: Oliver Buckland's "Thirty" at 10
The unheralded 2014 masterpiece finally sees a physical pressing
Nostalgic albums are always hard to write about. I can't explain the actual merits of something I'm that connected to - it all comes down to the memories I attach to it. Thirty is an exception, though.
It was recently brought to my attention that the album is finally getting physical pressings, a 2LP and 2CD on Turtle Pals Tapes with refurbished cover art:
The news sparked memories of a time when I counted the 30-song monolith among my favorite musical works. It was definitely a gateway drug to weirder, headier electronic music, directly sparking later interests like Aphex Twin and Chris Clark. Yet for all its quirky idiosyncrasies and relative obscurity, it really holds up by itself.
Each of the songs on the album was recorded in under 24 hours, "some of them under 12," according to Buckland's Bandcamp page. This is somehow not reflected at all in the quality of the songwriting, which is expertly poised, revealing a strong foundation in intellectual, multi-voiced classical and jazz composition as well as an appreciation for more modern music. This disconnection from the mainstream and hauntological obsession with older styles is a big part of why the album still holds up even though it was put out in 2014 (ten years ago this month, actually).
Where to begin? There are a few highlights and lowlights, but the bulk of the album is impressively consistent, with each track offering up its own bite-sized world of unique atmosphere and perplexing, complicated structure.
Standout tracks:
“Icosa” takes a more jazzy tone as the main synth line flies around in perpetual motion. It was used as background music in the influential surrealist short animation ENA: Auction Day, as seen below.
“Pendent” creates a welcoming yet alien atmosphere in the intro, which uses some interesting harmonies and a high-pitched, glittering synth line. A minute or two in, a stuttering robotic rhythm is interrupted by an extremely high drawn-out note, then the song folds itself back into motion, with the melody developing and repeating in mind-tickling ways.
“Scrapbook,” the second song on the album after the ambient intro, is playful and childlike, getting the absolute most out of a short, unidentifiable, chopped-up vocal sample. The complexity builds towards the second half of the song, as multiple melodic and rhythmic ideas are casually spooled out at the same time (listen to the high arpeggios building up to the last few measures - it’s like classical music!)
“Bloom,” a personal favorite, could be straight off an old jazz record with a different arrangement. Again with those mysterious wordless vocals, though the sample here (a female jazz singer run through a distortion pedal to great effect) is very different from the younger, androgynous vocalist of “Scrapbook.” According to Buckland, it’s partially sampled from this obscure 1944 song: https://archive.org/details/04-cant-help-lovin-dat-man. I can just about pick out the bit that goes “Tell me he’s late…,” but a few notes have to have been pitch-shifted or something.
“Tetrachromacy” and “Dynam,” and in fact a lot of songs in the back half of the album, create excellent sci-fi atmospheres - maybe not Star Wars or Blade Runner-type stuff, but more of a modernist, abstract, digital-world vibe, like the one seen in ENA.
“Bumbledom” - actually, I think “Bumbledom” speaks for itself.
Finally, the 7-minute “Trifecta” closes out the album with a bang, bringing back melodies and textures from a few previous songs into a glorious final statement. One of the last few things we hear is an orchestra tuning - maybe Buckland’s way of saying he’s just getting warmed up?
I have to stress again that these aren’t the kind of electronic tracks you’d hear at the club (not that that style of music isn’t excellent and deserving of attention!). Buckland belongs to the slightly artsier genre of digital fusion, a relatively recent term for a genre heavily informed by classic video game soundtracks and jazz improvisation. The phrase was coined in 2019 by Aivi & Surasshu, the musical duo responsible for much of the Steven Universe soundtrack, who set out a number of descriptions, including a sonic palette of “simple wave forms, rapid arpeggios, single channel delay, sampled chords” and a focus on “virtual improvisation: solos in which the process of creation is more spontaneous than a planned composition, but more premeditated than live improvisation, because of being tracked or sequenced into a computer.” Certainly tracks with what you hear on Thirty. More famous examples of digital fusion include Lena Raine’s OST for cult classic platformer Celeste (2018), plus Disasterpeace’s Fez (2012).
Note the amount of soundtracks - the relatively unobtrusive atmosphere that comes with the genre’s sound palette, as well as the influences it takes from the music of older video games, make it perfect background music when a certain semi-retro atmosphere is desired. In fact, Buckland went on to write the soundtrack for the upcoming ENA-related game Dream BBQ. Listen to his score for the trailer:
Another fun aspect of the genre is its focus on weird textures. Freed from the need to have real physical shows, emphasis drifts from arranging music for people to actually play (whether it’s written for a classical or jazz ensemble) towards an on-the-spot composition style. You couldn’t get a real-world keyboardist to play the jittery, rapid-fire speed-ups and slow-downs in the more agitated moments on this album, let alone adjust its timbre so radically on the fly.
Physical musicians also couldn’t change the instrumentation so completely with each song. One of Thirty’s greatest successes is how it manages to keep such a consistent atmosphere when each song is arranged for a completely different set of instruments: opener “Before” is built around a spacey drone while drums, humming vocalists, and bleeping synth lines float in and out; “Scrapbook” uses two synths, bass, and a totally different vocalist, not to mention the the heavily bitcrushed percussion; “Rapid Data Transfer” uses just one keyboard quickly alternating between settings while drums and a sample of a barcode scanner (???) plays in the background, and that’s just the first three songs out of, uh, thirty. The logistics of making any of it happen in real life really start to become absurd when you get to the string section and choral samples in the second half, although it’s always clear the entire album was fundamentally written at a keyboard. This is music that could only have been made in the last thirty or forty years, and would have only been possible for the most advanced avant-gardists before that.
Anyway, it’s an excellent piece of music, and I do recommend taking time out of your day to listen to all 77 minutes. Every single song has at least a kernel of an interesting idea - Buckland really has a gift for turning any little fragment of melody into a good song.
Tune in for the next Jaffeelabs article in two weeks!