By Deuce

Crafty Chris Ianuzzi is back at it again, this time with a double-sided single, “Distant Suns”, which is paired with “Wild Side”. The latter represents, if not some of his best efforts, certainly a healthy organ in his body of eccentric, eclectic work.

“Wild Side” is spooky, yet not necessarily in a dark way. It’s more of an unpredictable journey, in which one has no idea what’s going to happen—or which way Ianuzzi is going to go—next. He’s got rich, dizzyingly disorienting percussion that sets the tone for the piece, supporting both up tempo beats and startling slow ones at different times.

Other than that the number’s pure chaos, with the synthesizer aficionado melding a swift bass line into a drum pattern curiously bereft of a snare, tempting you with a heaping dose of some sort of congas, and overloading on his trademark synths. The thing one learns after listening to enough Ianuzzi is, quite seriously, you never know what exactly you’re hearing. His sounds are far off screams, some of which could be his highly effected, slurred speech vocals—or maybe something he sampled, or whipped up on one of his many modules, or anything else he’s encountered on this tiny planet.

“Listen to your wild side” is the refrain and it’s much more of an admonition than it is a lyric, delivered over this particular pastiche of tempo and sounds, grooves and caveats. He opens up with a lead at one point before evaporating it into little drops of the same sound exploding into different channels. The experience is somewhat surreal, hard to behold, and instant Ianuzzi classic material.

“Distant Suns” is more conventional. It’s quick, clocking in at around 120 BPM, and keeps a pretty constant kick that, when accentuated with heavy bass (as is the case for most of the record), serves as a definite touchstone and guide on this mission into the ether.

But he hits you with the 80’s arcade video game shooting sounds, splays and plasters them all about the track, and smoothes it out with a palatable melody of synthesized voices that turns things blisteringly bright—and refreshing, at that. In fact, this series of notes sounds so good Ianuzzi closes the number with it, letting it bang again and again, a capella, as he rockets on into other galaxies of sounds, thoughts, and vocals.