Dimensional Holofonic Sound is one of many projects helmed by Ben Stokes, Bay Area visual artist and producer of spliced beats, often ripped from what must be a vast catalogue of video clips. For a taste of his visual output, seek out the 2018 video ‘Please Keep Shopping’, under his Quiet World guise, an eyeball-scorching reality disturbance from a ‘Mad Men’ exec’s LSD trip.
This latest outing opens with a mid-century American narrator informing us that only 11 per cent of what we learn comes through hearing, which heralds the dubstep bass, agitated percussion and rampantly violent slicing edits in the title track. Breaks, speaker-shaking bass and sci-fi FX are all the order of the day, as the album moves through its audio gymnastics seeking electro-dub transcendence. There are track titles, ‘Seeing’, ‘Seen’, ‘Visual Audio’, ‘DJ Jerks’, but they merge into a collage of beats, vocal samples and snatches of melody that melt away almost as soon as they’ve appeared. Tasty DJ food for the more experimentally oriented listener.
