11:00 pm
Byetone—Death of a Typographer (2008)
Leaving the performance space behind him, the invisible man resumes his journey east under the el tracks. Each step on the concrete of the sidewalk brings fresh pain to his aching, bare, invisible feet. He can only imagine the size of the invisible blisters that are forming as he keeps moving. Presently he sees a taxi stopped just ahead. A couple from out of town with several pieces of musical equipment in tow are talking to the cabbie by the car's open trunk, trying their best to describe their downtown hotel, the name of which they've forgotten. During the confusion, the invisible man slips into the passenger's seat.
He had initially only planned on stowing away in the taxi long enough to deliver him downtown but the throbbing of his feet convinces him to stay in the car long after the couple has collected their instruments and disappeared though the revolving door of their hotel. He rides with the cabbie from place to place, picking up a trio of young women in microscopic skirts from a curbside and delivering them to a club, picking up a pair of paunchy middle-aged men in sport coats from a restaurant and delivering them to a piano bar, listening to talk radio in some unidentifiable foreign language, stopping at red, accelerating at green. Dioramas of urban life breeze by outside the windows. He begins to feel that he is a part of the vast circulatory system of the city—flowing and pausing to the rhythms of electrical signals, carrying essential nutrients from one corner to another.
This vital metropolitan electronic pulse is the raw material from which
Death of a Typographer is constructed. It's an album of minimalism, space, and tiny precise detail that draws you in with that hypnotic power of feeling like you are a nanoscale circuit in some vast, important electronic network. Throughout the album, Olaf Bender, the guy behind Byetone, treats us to a number of urban heartbeat style tracks such as "Plastic Star", "Straight" and "Capture This [ii]" which call to mind sped up images of headlights and taillights streaking by, stopping and starting abruptly at traffic lights like luminous blood coursing through the city's veins. At other times, as on "Black is Black", he brings in more of a melodic, almost pop sensibility—the sounds of people interacting on the sidewalk or hopping into a taxi. Then of course he delves into the tiny, clipped percussive minimalism of "Rocky" and "Grand Style", both of which feel like the very electric signals that drive the traffic lights and power the street lamps crisscrossing beneath the city streets. Lastly, are the album's more ambient sections, "Capture This [i]" and "Heart", fuzzy droning moments that call to a taxi ride along the waterfront, windows down, zipping through the darkness.
When, after several laps throughout the city, the cab is hailed by a group of five large Texans, the invisible man knows his ride is finished. He slips out the door as a curly-headed fat man opens it, and drifts away down the street.