Record Reviews

Yea Big

originally published April 5, 2006

Yea Big is Stefen Robinson, an eccentric art school vet who, under his birth name, roller-skates competitively, and, under his alias, creates noisy, difficult, omnivorous sound collages. Like most young musicians, he does not attempt to work without exhibiting a certain inspirational debt to hip hop. But, like many of his confederates in the shut-in electro-experimental underground, he eschews hip hop’s fluctuating standards of integrity, subscribing only to his wild range of influences (in interviews, he often name-checks Jim O’Rourke) and his wild imagination.

On The Wind That Blows The Robot’s Arms, his full-length debut, Robinson takes us on an ADD-damaged hopscotch through 25 tracks. The presentation is stunning - the arrangements and the production boast a depth rarely heard on this sort of adventure. At the same time, a lot of the music sounds as though he made it on stuff he got from a Happy Meal. Yea Big’s is an aesthetic at once forbidding and playful, a mix of steely chaos dating back to the earliest electronic music and a good-natured sense of humor placing it squarely in the goofy, wondrous present. While the music ain’t always catchy, the chi always is.

My friend Chris hates this and describes this as “what death sounds like,” so I won’t guarantee that any one person will swing on it. And yet, I wish everyone could hear it. While it isn’t the easiest thing to love, creative types tend to pursue the elusive. And any art and music influenced by Yea Big is art I’d like to see, music I’d like to hear.

Emerson Dameron

Emerson Dameron