The scope of Robert Beatty's hydra-headed art practice has grown into an extreme articulation
of unconfined creativity across multiple disciplines. A founding member of 2000's noise outfit
Hair Police, as well as visionary illustrator and album-art designer for many of this era's most
celebrated underground artists, Robert Beatty records his solo work under the name Three
Legged Race. Come May 27, 2014, Three Legged Race will release the first volume of Rope
Commercial, a planned series of EPs premiering through the label Underwater Peoples.
Rope Commercial Vol. 1 will be the first Three Legged Race record since 2012's
acclaimed Persuasive Barrier (Spectrum Spools / Editions Mego) and Beatty's follow up to last
year's video score collection, Soundtracks for Takeshi Murata (Glistening Examples, 2013).
Beatty's recent celebrated performances as Three Legged Race abandoned prior
synthesizer-dependent set-ups in favor of an intentionally dematerialized approach, employing just a sequencer program in an iPhone, and a lone tape machine. Conceptually, Beatty is
defitantly shrugging off the fetishized hardware-oriented model so rampant in current
electronic music discourse. Beatty steps further in this recording, having added acoustic
instruments (dulcimer and piano) and thoroughly processing sampled elements to warp the
whole into un-recognizable dimensions.
Outfitted as a picture-disc, Beatty’s design features a creamy, neon-green urban
landscape; the face of a humanoid figure is merged with a screen of a smartphone, its
consciousness fused to the glass. Dangling from the phone is one leg outfitted in a woman's
heel, presumably its sole means of transport. These kind of pathetic cyborg figures in states of
physical flux frequently appear in Beatty's art. They function neatly as windows into Beatty's
music as well, with its electronically marred voices and barren sonic spaces. These figures are
Beatty's torpid avatars, in both his music and art, their humanism is strained by a confounding
digital synergy.
The picture-disc is an apt setting for Beatty's airbrush work, his favored rendering
tool, and the general modus operandi of Beatty's electronic music as Three Legged Race. In all,
Beatty renews obsolete materials discarded from a voracious commercial culture, and employs
them in strangely poignant contexts. In Rope Commercial Vol. 1, such found samples are diced
and strewn into uneasy chapters. There is the dizzying, terse "All Ajax Dial", the interplanetary
gale of "Aside From Each Other and Together Overnight", the faintly whirring "New Government", the white noise of "The Humidity Mascot" and perhaps Beatty's motif-to-be "Rope
Commercial." In this title track alone, something of the whole EP is condensed: intentionally
un-heroic melodies plod out over a darkly redundant groove and voices are haltered in the
instance of utterance. Its electronic music most overtly, but defrocked of its sheen, with any
conceivable hallmark of commercialism littered on the gravel.
1. All Ajax Dial
2. Aside From Each Other and Together Overnight
3. New Government
4. The Humidty Mascot
5. Rope Commercial