Fuxa - Dirty D (2013)

There is perhaps a misconception that creating and recording largely experimental and oblique electronic music is a solitary process. You can easily imagine the clichéd image of the tortured professorish technician obsessing over minute details of sound in search of creating a machine-made masterpiece. Füxa has certainly been making that kind of endlessly fascinating electronic music. However, while Randall Nieman has been the sole musician under the Füxa name since Ryan Anderson’s departure in 1998, Dirty D, his second album in two years following Electric Sound of Summer, is a hugely collaborative project. The sense of playful creativity runs through the 12 pieces of music here.
Dirty D sees Nieman working with collaborators old and new. Indeed, the 16 strong list includes former Füxa partner Ryan Anderson and Ann Shenton of Add N To (X) who Nieman first worked with 13 years ago. It is some new cohorts though who help to create the lovely feeling of blissful, gentle euphoria that surrounds the album.

There is a curious mix of airlocked electronica and gaseous synthesiser echoes aligned to weeping and yearning slide guitar provided by esteemed pedal steel player BJ Cole, a newcomer to the Füxa oeuvre. Cole’s work helps to give Dirty D its strong emotional core. The music may be largely electronic based but it is alive, organic and heartfelt. You can easily lose yourself in the supremely graceful and quite beautiful sounds of Forward, which is a wonderfully graceful synth ballad. There are no words, and there is no need for them. The overarching synth and aching guitar say all there is to say.