Human Potential Releases Track 'Fast Trash'

Human Potential, the solo project of composer/musician/producer/filmmaker Andrew Becker (former drummer of Dischord Records' Medications and Brooklyn experimental outfit Screens), has released its latest track "Fast Trash" today via Brooklyn Vegan. The song appears on the forthcoming album I'm Glad You're Alive, out February 7, 2020 via on Becker's own, What Delicate Recordings. Listen to "Fast Trash" below!

About the track: "For nigh on a decade, the Human Potential Cosmodemonic Research Lab has been fastidiously working on AI technology that could, should and would relieve the herculean burden shouldered by founder, Andrew Becker, in order to write popular music songs. As Becker became increasingly indifferent to picking up a guitar or depressing a piano key, as well as insisting on spending more time watching Philadelphia 76ers basketball, we labored to design a throng of machines capable of replicating the preternatural insipidness for which the Human Potential sound project is renown. Unfortunately, just as we were on the brink of an astounding, paradigm shifting breakthrough, the technology was destroyed after one machine accused another of stealing a melody, hired an intellectual property attorney and subsequently infected our server with hacked Burisma data, which was then confiscated by Robert O'Brien himself. With no recourse, we placed a guitar in Mr. Becker's torpid hands, hoping that the mellifluous sounds of an out of tune E chord would reanimate his moribund spirit. Alas, two days later, Becker strolled into the lab with a tune he had christened, "Fast Trash". From our family to yours...enjoy!"

Human Potential's third album, Hot Gun Western Music, was released in 2017 and met with praise from the likes of Stereogum, which hailed the album's "blasting percussion... layered under shimmery synths and experimental tones... that fade in and out between soothing and writhing and feel different after every listen." New Noise Magazine said "Becker's iconoclastic sounds are propelled by rhythmic qualities and shards of dream-pop and prog-rock that make the best use out of unusual synth and ambient textures on both the light and dark side of the spectrum." Self-Titled called the album "...a towering piece of experimental pop music."

Immediately after the release of "Hot Gun Western City", Becker decided to, once and for all, leave the confines of his noxious, New York City lean-to, plotting an inspirational journey that he hoped would recalibrate his world-weary sonic paradigm and rectify his musical peccadillos.

After securing the appropriate licensing, Becker lifted off from lower Manhattan in a hypercolor dirigible determined to record the longest, weirdest and most goddamn carefree helium powered expedition in human history. But, just 3,000 miles in, the mighty zeppelin caught the tail of the notorious Santa Ana winds, sending the airship plunging towards the raccoon infested metropolis of Los Angeles.

Upon impact, Becker found himself well ensconced in an East L.A. rambler, outfitted with
remarkably amateur recording gear, an entire wall emblazoned with Basil Kirchin ephemera and a wine cellar stocked with a vintage year, Cold Duck. At long last...revelation!

Becker immediately began toiling with the abecedarian apparatuses, attempting to synthesize the pop fizz of early Alice Cooper, the specious din of Jack Ruby, the dusty disorder of the Feederz and the clang, glang and glug of Don Cherry and Krzysztof Penderecki's putrid, 1971 quasi-collabo, "Actions." However, the result of this itchy experimentation took an unexpected turn, objectively sounding like "Dangerous Business," as performed by Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman in the criminally underrated big screen masterstroke, "Ishtar."

Completely and hopelessly confounded by his creation, Becker linked up with true blue rock n' roll dude, Jarvis Taveniere, who promised to mix, affix and reign in the ravenous squawk if, and only if, there was a fresh steak of hake flown in from Bognor Regis every Thursday. AB obliged.

Together the two bent, molded and scolded each scintilla of sound, laboring over sessions that produced migraine headaches, early-morning bull sessions surrounding mid-15th century syncretic religions, and apparitions of a youthful Brigitte Fontaine donning a downright scandalously elegant, pewter power smock.

After what seemed like a time period longer than the Pilocene Epoch, Becker applied the last bit of scum to, "I'm Glad You're Alive". The result is not so much an album, but a philosophical treatise...an analytical and cosmological model of reconditioning that gives virility to the impotent and provides aural relief to the sonically infirm. Its myriad textures and disparate vibrations bandy through the ether, penetrating the tympanic membrane and worming their way deep, deep down into the fourth dimensional recesses of the eternal subconsciousness. It evokes, not only the sensation of rainy, lovelorn Surinamese nights, but the timeless nihilism of early 20th century Dadaism. Or, as Becker's paternal great-step-grandfather, John Cage, once stated, "I have nothing to say and I am saying it and that is poetry as I need it."