With Patio User Manual, Alex Cobb continues his decades-long quest to mirror the stillness and richness of the cosmos here on Earth. His delicate, carefully wrought soundscapes – which first arrived under the name Taiga Remains but have since taken on the Etelin moniker – flow with the grace of starlight and the solemnity of hypnagogia. Weaving webs of synths and field recordings, Cobb probes for the hidden meaning present within liminal spaces. He’s interested in understanding those loci where we interact with our environment, both that in which we physically exist and that in which our spirits dwell.
On this particular album, Cobb casts his gaze toward the place where the natural world adjoins urban and suburban dwellings: the patio. The irony isn’t lost on him; patios are human-tamed nature at its most extreme. He expresses this disjunction in the first few minutes of “All Day Moon,” the opening piece. Birds chirp, insects chatter, and a cow lows. Only after we’ve experienced nature unfettered does Cobb allow his synths to penetrate the mix, as soft waves of fuzz-infused sound slowly rise to meet the graceful fauna-produced melodies. Glitch shards poke through the gauzy tones like ice crystals on a frozen, mist-shrouded pond, and traces of a choir haunt the proceedings.
Cobb coaxes his synths to produce uncanny melodies and warped, multi-dimensional shapes, tugging at various emotional states. There’s a sense of trepidation inspired by the alien tones, but this is tempered by the depth and warmth of the fizzy static and the softness of the harmonies. Is it possible for music to be comforting and unnerving simultaneously? Cobb thinks so and links this back to the concept of the patio as both a relaxing space and a city dweller’s frontier, beyond which lies wildlife (or as close an approximation as can exist in a metropolis). The understated, ambient melodies carry a sense of compelling mystery, a combination of xenophobia and xenophilia that Cobb believes lies at our core. He makes a compelling argument, so why not dive into Patio User Manual and decide whether you agree?
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