In the world of music reviews, few words get bandied about as much as the near infantile ‘under-rated’, a term usually wedged in before the description of a billion-selling Beatles album. Despite this habit, the word has its uses, and one artist that might meaningfully be described as actually under-rated, is Frank Riggio.
Wielding a fairly uncontroversial palette of IDM, Riggio is probably best compared to Amon Tobin, the crowned king of dance-orientated sound-design. Like Tobin, his music is not adverse to a thunderous wobble or dance-floor groove, despite its tendency to focus more on the expressive qualities of synthesis. Having developed his aesthetic throughout his prior ‘psychexcess’ albums, 2024 sees him embarking on his biggest project yet – a 4 album opus entitled QU4DRILOGY.
Seemingly released in reverse order, the first part, ‘QU4’, celebrates slinking non-western scales through thumping basses and fizzing, growling leads, its sound world adorned with endless reams of artfully handled distortion and grit. Moments of structure come and go, giving way to sounds that fall firmly outside of normative musical descriptions – ‘a bit like several stones rolling down a glass hill’ or ‘dying ambulance stuck in a time loop’ might get you close. Riggio borrows from the expected palette of IDM and dubstep (I feel there’s probably something called ‘neuro-dance’ or some thing just as ludicrous, this is all firmly outside of my wheelhouse), but its never played straight – lofty mountains of side-chain compression and earth-shattering PWM basses are framed by aliensque synth vocals and filthy, inconsistent stabs.
Part 2, ‘dry’, chills out a little -less earth-shattering and more leftfield electronica, an album reliant on massive shifts between its lightest moments and its heaviest. ‘It’s mostly a bit more normal than part 1, and suffers for it – ‘Gossam’ – a stand out track of the series as a whole, channels the sort of massiveness than both post-rock and industrial bands rarely achieve, and if the rest of the album enjoys a little too much meandering acoustic bass, its lack of rough edges are hardly a mortal crime.
With a pleasing balance, part 3, ‘lo’, is the weirdest by far. ‘Random existence’ opens with drawn-out beds of wavering strings and Zimmeresque ‘spaceship warp core engaging’ soundbites (you know the one), a deep arpeggio fights with swarming distortions and rising shards of synthesis, before falling apart completely on the near perfect ‘musique quantique’. Hundreds of containers in a thousand sizes seem to explore at random, a mad chaos of off-kilter kicks and screaming electronics, no structure or perceivable logic.
The final / opening part (depending which way you approach these things), entitled ‘gy’, pull many of the threads of its peers together, forming a cohesive, and wonderfully deep whole. In many respects, this is far less of a genre-piece – Riggio’s love of IDM is downplayed in favour of evolving sound-design that, though it never gets too weird, maintains a sombre, restrained air. Tracks like ‘Photons’ feel a little like they could sit on a Johann Johansson soundtrack, whilst the likes of ‘Consciousness creates reality’ sits somewhere between ‘Isam’-era Amon Tobin and a super minimalist Daft Punk, all warped vocoders and no actual beats.
QU4DRILOGY represents another step up in Frank Riggio’s already impressive body of work – four albums that explore a similar sound world whilst never getting boring. The expressive nature of his sound-design – even whilst it often wields thematically similar beds of distortion and grit – creates a series of tracks that wash over the listener, avoiding the cliches of IDM in the process. After all this time, I’m hopeful that this will be the project that finally gets Riggio the sort of attention his talent so clearly deserves.
Daniel Hignell-Tully
MEANS 