To any local music freak with half a brain and basically functioning ear canals, Jim Magas has been an obvious leader of Chicago’s “interesting music” vanguard for more than 20 years—my introduction to him was in the mid-90s at the Fireside Bowl, when he was fronting short-lived (and totally excellent) no-wave horror punks Lake of Dracula. If you held a gun to my head today (please don’t!) and told me to make a list of the top ten “rock” bands I’ve ever seen live, I’m pretty sure Lake of Dracula would be on there somewhere. The Reader‘s Peter Margasak described the Magas of that era as “a genuine maniac” who balanced “confrontational zeal . . . and arrhythmic whooping with propulsive hectoring,” which is also an apt description of his present guise as one-man electro party Magas—a project that’s been turning out dance floors with screwball MPC-generated thump since 2000.
I don’t know what kind of synthesizers Alex Barnett uses, but I do know that whenever I listen to any of his broad array of recordings—which include solo efforts, albums with Sher and Jeremiah Fisher as Oakeater, and a collaboration with Mamiffer‘s Faith Coloccia—I somehow feel like I’m the one being listened to. Since Barnett is such a notably nice guy, I’m probably just being paranoid about the insidious, mathematical intelligence I imagine that he’s arrayed against me—but “Slapwalk,” a twitchy and unsettling representative cut from his new LP, Chew From the Mind, drops me into the slow-build horror-film mind frame of the surveilled:
