RADIANT RADISH

Description

Producer Ian Ostaszewski, based in Peoria, Illinois, makes music under the name Jetski. His gonzo sample-based production manifests as overwhelming sound collages of juxtaposed sounds charged by complex networks of overlapping rhythms and dizzying shifts in mood and timbre, all meticulously arranged to the point that it feels like hearing a live band burn through a set of hyper-progressive music. The Radiant Radish, his first album on Hausu Mountain, follows his debut album Reflex Engine (released on the satellite label HausMo Blorpus Editions in 2022) with an impressive cycle of freewheeling sample-assembly songs. He injects numerous fragments drawn from royalty-free sound libraries and public domain films – estimated to be between 4,000 and 4,500 samples – into constantly active composite takes, performed live on his network of samplers running on iPads and iPhones. Despite all the ballistic pandemonium of his album, Jetski surprises us more with the sophistication and dreamlike organization of his arrangements than with their disarray. With relatively anonymous sources providing the building blocks of The Radiant Radish, the album draws its manic power not from listeners' ability to identify the origins of the sounds or to contextualize them along a cultural timeline, but from the hallucinatory storytelling and shifting rhythmic reality of Jetski's collages themselves on an instant-to-instant basis. We recognize the tones of each instrument, but we cannot determine exactly what they are playing as they crash into the mix in a distorted manner for a few seconds, just as we come to trace brief passages of rhythm made of staccato samples that pass by too quickly to even attempt to identify. Soon after, we abandon the idea of choosing anything and let the tidal wave of sounds from Jetski overwhelm us.