A Beginner’s Guide To Hard Hat Color Coding is a new project by BlindººCoyote, longstanding monicker of Drem Bruinsma, a Dutch-born composer now based in Alicante, Spain, whose work under this moniker reminds me of peak-period Cluster finding a bit of time to carouse with an early-wave Industrial band (think Cabaret Voltaire’s more daring experimental work than the dark funk they would produce during their heyday). It would make sense, as BlindººCoyote has been alive as a project since the early 1990s, and this particular sound to me is timeless. The project has been active (with some periods of non-activity) since its first 1993 release, Phantom Pain/Genkaku no Itami, a project which stemmed from a collaboration with legendary jazz fusion trumpeter Toshinori Kondo.
There’s something very kosmisch about this particular release, though it has flourishes of a cold, metallic bent. This floats surprisingly easily and envelops this listener into a dreamy, lulling feeling. There’s also a reminiscence of sounds made by such acts as BlindººCoyote’s one-time collaborators Tuxedomoon (he wrote scores for video, dance, theatre and collaborated with the individual members of Tuxedomoon, amongst others).
As a side note, and quite a tasty one, the first track on this EP, Chapter One: Red Hard Hat Area, will also appear on the compilation Radio Nautilus, released by No Records on June 1.
To explore more of BlindººCoyote’s works, visit his Bandcamp site here, and his Reverb Nation site here.
