Forcefield - Roggaboggas
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Though Forcefield consists of only four members, the personnel listing for Roggaboggas tallies just under thirty individuals. The collective is a costumed lot of musical hooligans with names that combine absurdist humor and onomatopoeic foolery. Ringleaders Patootie Lobe, Meerk Puffy, Gorgon Radeo, and Le Geef lead the troupe on a seventy-minute romp through a world of goofball electronics, twisted trances, and squishy grooves. Roggaboggas is the soundtrack to a performance by the group at the Whitney Biennial, in which sixty-odd humans cavorted in a large room to loud electronic music. Without having been there, it's hard to say exactly what may have taken place, but, judging from some vague descriptions and the knit costumes worn by the creatures in the CD's packaging, it's easy to guess that Forcefield's performance was a wonder to behold. It's a shame that the stand-alone soundtrack recording of the night is not so mystifying.
Roggaboggas is a pastiche of warped electronic sounds, with tracks varying in length from fifteen seconds to twenty minutes. Motifs of all shapes and sizes come and go, even on some of the disc's longer tracks. The fifteen-minute "Field Recording 3rd Annual Roggabogga" mixes a grating background with incidental speech and bursts of noise while "Space Dibs" is three minutes of sound waves that could easily be 60s science-fiction computer effects. Throughout almost any stylistic turn it makes, there's an underlying sense of rhythmic groove to Roggaboggas, but nothing that makes it anything close to a dance album, or even one that's remotely traditional in any sense of electronic music. The transience of the album's shorter tracks combined with the undulating repetitiveness of many of the longer ones makes Roggaboggas a mix of two extremes, as some of its most interesting sonic explorations are cut short too soon, and some linger far longer than seems warranted. All of this, however, hinges on the fact that this album is a soundtrack, though not in a normal sense. It's impossible to estimate the exact nature of the interplay of Forcefield's music with the more bodily parts of their performance. However, purpose and propriety aside, Roggaboggas fails to interest this listener as much as I'm sure the live performance at the Whitney could have, and whatever mystical, hypnotic magic was alive that night was lost, at least partially, in translation. An occasionally interesting audio document, but far from being essential.
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