Mark Cetilia: The New Way

The New Way was funded in part by the RISD Professional Development Fund, but don’t go putting on your monocle and bowtie just yet: this isn’t the stuffy academic composition of yore. Mark Cetilia is clearly a trained and educated producer of electronic music, but The New Way is lively and downright aggressive at times, less about the majestic presence of a few select tones so much as the chaos that can ensue from multiple electronic processes firing off at the same time. “Analog / digital electronics” are the credited instrumentation, and they’re described as both “improvised and generative” which makes sense when sitting down with it. Some of this stuff sounds like sparks flying from a downed telephone cable, whereas certain tones are so sumptuously synthetic it’s like watching sunlight hit the moon’s surface inside the Metaverse. If you’ve got two full twelve-inch LPs of electronic music at your disposal, might as well mix it up! Part of me wants to compare The New Way to Forcefield (it’s the Providence connection), but I’m also reminded of deliberate electronic synthesists like Black Merlin (though in the case of Mark Cetilia, only the faintest trace of techno can be detected here). Lots of patience-testing frequencies and brain-scrambling sonic mixtures to be found through this double album, but if you enjoy experiencing the wild things a person can do with a laptop and some gear, that’s probably what you’re after in the first place.

– Yellow Green Red (2022)