Impossible Nothing

Impossible Nothing (the brainchild of Texas-based producer Darwin Frost) painstakingly constructed the monumental four-hour tour de force of Phonemenomicon (2016), consisting of 26 ten-minute collages (each one lasts exactly 10:00). Why 26? Because each piece is titled after a letter of the alphabet.
A alone contains more ideas than the average three-minute song, lined up to compose a cinematic score with sections that are sentimental and sections that are pure fun. B plunders hip-hop music to create a hypnotic syncopated industrial clockwork. C begins like a lame sample of a lame funk-soul song but soon becomes a harrowing psychodrama... except for returning to a funk-soul party. D deconstructs jazz with a dizzying multitude of colliding fragments. E toys with a pounding Afro-funk shuffle but quickly delves into constantly mutating machine music and towards the end blends in a powerful punch of riff and drumming. F dissolves reggae steps into a molasses of warped electronica that at the end is hijacked by a jazz jam. G targets what sounds like the soundtrack of a thriller, but then takes a detour into a surreal exotic chant, only to end with a more magniloquent cinematic theme. H is another tribute to euphoric soul music of the 1960s with a great break/solo of distorted keyboards at the seven-minute mark. A similar breathtaking solo opens I.
J first disintegrates funk-jazz of the 1960s, then shoots a hysterical techno missile, then sets in motion cold machine music, then rediscovers humanity in a soaring synth drone and sounds of the beach.
M concocts a romantic trumpet melody over mechanical polyrhythms that turns into a funk orgy and a videogame sonata. A female shouter has to duel with a rapper, an accordion and a big band in N, one of the virtuoso pieces littered with all sorts of incidents.
K is pure dancefloor, while S ends in a frenzied state of panic. By the standards of this operation, P is ambient music: the source cannot be identified and all we hear is a hypnotic sequence of beats and chords; a very captivating pieces of instrumental dance music, that towards the end morphs into a sort of xylophone melody. Musique concrete artist Pierre Henry should have done this.
Slavic-gypsy music and dubstep are the ingredients of O. R intones a spastic reggae dancehall beat and a petulant keyboard launches into an anthemic melody played at triple speed. Three more minutes and the piece is invaded by alien noise so that, when the petulant keyboard resumes, it feels like UFO music. T is an even more creative take on reggae rhythm as played by an army of sentient industrial machines. W dishes out some Hendrix-ian chaos mixed with vocal harmonies of the ancient past and ends in a festive beach party. X paints another surrealistic exotic panorama, this one with Indian and klezmer overtones. Z sounds like a synth-pop take on Los Del Rio's dance craze Macarena by electronic funk-jazz guru Herbie Hancock, slowly contaminated by a horn fanfare and by an ecstatic hippy chant. Whenever the artist injects humor or satire, the project evokes the Residents, but clearly a lot more science went into these four hours of superhuman cut and paste.

Lexemenomicon (2017) delivered a clone of the previous album: 26 ten-minute pieces for four hours of music, relentless plunderphonics for syncopated robotic dancing in wildly distorted aural landscapes. The main problem on this album is that many of these ten-minutes suites last five minutes too long. The catchy novelty works for the first half, but then it overstays its welcome. A bit of pruning would have helped. The chaotic blender of voices in Bb is an exuberant intermezzo, but should really last only three minutes, not ten. Dd is, for five minutes, a deliciously simpler collage, with whipping electric discharges composing a linear dancefloor beat for chill-out rooms in gothic night-clubs, later propelled by Duane Eddy-style twanging guitar (before it starts sinking in a sequence of pointless quotations). Jj starts out with a great idea, a thumping blues-hop-metal hybrid, but drags it on for way too long. Portions of Ll sounds like a satirical Frank Zappa skit. Qq builds up intriguing tension between the very abstract beginning and the samples of hectic rave-ups, but, again, ten minutes of this is four or five too many. Rr flirts with nostalgia by sampling a big band of the swing era, but then doesn't know where to go and so completely changes tune. Uu entertains with echoes of bouncing videogame soundtracks and of synth-pop ditties. Vv has a workable tune in it, and occasionally it comes out brilliantly. Three minutes into Ww one is treated to the rare guitar riff, that keeps surfacing in its jungle of samples, and the end is a warped circus fanfare.

Let's focus on the ones that deserve their ten-minute duration. Aa sounds like a mash-up of movie soundtracks, with a peak when it reinvents organ-driven soul-jazz of the 1970s, ending with an ethnic fanfare. Cc is a jam of smooth jazz vivisected in a laboratory of musique concrete, slowly mutated into a hyper-syncopated hiccupping hard-rock of the 1970s, slowly mutated again into a disjointed agonizing blues jam with Hendrix-ian glissandoes and psychedelic overtones. Gg is a luscious pulsating dubstep and hip-hop deconstruction that settles into a feverish hypnotic videogame dance and ends with a soaring soul anthem. The angelic Ii blends intricate dance steps, jazz instruments and operatic contralto (it is not a coincidence that this is one of the most coherent and linear pieces). Nn is one of the most propulsive pieces thanks to whirling stews of keyboards and voices. The pounding industrial polyrhythms of Yy are more than most bands can conjure in a lifetime.

Several pieces just don't work. Ee betrays again his passion for organ-driven soul-jazz of the 1970s, but its samples are so transparent that it quickly becomes tedious. For too long Ff seems devoid of a mission, and its petulant guitar solo is welcome only when it disappears to let a dancefloor-friendly beat take over. Hh is a trivial revisitation of hip-hop stereotypes. Oo is too abstract to be anything in particular. Zz, Tt, Pp, Ss, Kk and Mm are plain childish. Pure filler. The samples are too transparent in pieces such as Xx, as if Frost, under pressure to complete his 26-song project, didn't want to spend the time to work his old magic on them. Where it works, this still stands as a masterful Bosch-esque fresco of the contemporary musical civilization, but it works only occasionally.

Alas, Impossible Nothing decided to flood the world with his 4-hour 26-song albums. Within a few months the world received the gift of: Tonemenomicon (2017), Taxemenomicon (2017), Glossemenomicon (2017), Chronemenomicon (2018), Phrasemenomicon (2018), Graphemenomicon (2018), and Visemenomicon (2018). The tragedy is not that Frost suddenly felt that he had so many ideas (or had so many to dust off from his hard disk) but that each one lasts ten interminable minutes. It quickly became a joke, or, at least, a project without listeners.

The 40-minute piece Tzadik (2021) is another abstract collage of electronic sounds.