Photo: Lenny Gonzalez

Kyle Bruckmann is a man of many talents: a composer, educator, improviser, electronic musician and master oboist. Having been a fixture of the Chicago experimental music underground for several years, he has also built a reputation as a prominent experimental musician in Oakland where he now resides.
Bruckmann has just released his first electronic solo album, Mesmerics/Hindsight, a bewilderingly double record that traverses wide-ranging sonic terrains, blending industrial, noise, psych, and trance. The highlight on Mesmerics/Hindsight A is on space while Mesmerics/Hindsight B highlights periodicity. The album “anachronistically evokes, from a sardonic post-techno vantage point, both late 60s and late 70s experimentation”, describes the press release. “By turns hypnotic, immersive, and bludgeoning, Mesmerics/Hindsight charts an unlikely Venn diagram linking the Day-Glo legacy of the San Francisco Tape Music Center with proto-Industrial’s bleak, gray throb.”

Mesmerics/Hindsight was composed and crafted between Bruckmann’s home studio and the electronic music labs of two colleges he teaches at, where he had access to instruments such as the classic Buchla, Moog, and E-mu gear and also more contemporary Eurorack modules. Speaking about the outcome, he described it as “an interleaved love letter to two volatile junctures (both especially salient in the history of the synthesizer) on which I’ve remained perennially fixated: the heady intersection of ‘art music’ experimentalism with ‘popular’ psychedelia as the 60s skidded through the Altamont Pass into the 70s, and the gag reflex of post-punk and industrial as the 70s gave way to the Anglo-American neocon hellscape of the 80s.”

For a staggering taste of what’s on offer, listen to “Used To Dance”, taken from Mesmerics/Hindsight B.