Telefon Tel Aviv’s new Immolate Yourself opens with a song called “The Birds,” and at first it sounds like business as usual for the local electronic duo: swelling billows of ambient synth, colored by dabs of distortion, and behind them the steady heartbeat of a Moroder-style pulse. But the meticulously programmed glitch tracks that Charles Cooper and Joshua Eustis have made their name with never kick in—instead of one of their usual IDM-inflected microsuites, “The Birds” turns into a dark, almost scruffy techno-pop number, with actual human fingerprints all over it. This is Telefon Tel Aviv 2.0, and though Cooper and Eustis have taken a few steps backward with their gear, it’s definitely an upgrade.
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On Immolate Yourself the piled-up synth parts aren’t all locked to the unwavering MIDI clock of a sequencer—many of them were played in real time, and you can hear the tiny imprecisions that distinguish musicians from machines. In the past Cooper and Eustis have recruited polished pros like Lindsay Anderson of L’altra and Canadian trip-hopper Esthero to sing, but here they handle all the vocals themselves, sticking to a breathy, understated style and burying their voices in the mix. The Rhodes electric piano that’s come to characterize the Telefon Tel Aviv sound is gone, and the fractal-intricate programmed rhythms have been replaced by relatively straightforward beats and live percussion from a handful of guests. “On one of the [earlier] records there was a minute-and-something piece of drum programming that took five weeks to make,” says Cooper. “It’s like we were doing Claymation.” Most important, the new songs feel like organic entities—that is, more like songs than like strings of carefully plotted points in a sequencer interface.
At the beginning of last year it wasn’t even clear that there would be another Telefon Tel Aviv album. “We took a long hiatus,” says Cooper, that began even before their second full-length, Map of What Is Effortless, came out in early 2004 and didn’t end till early 2008. “We didn’t know if we were going to do this record until we got together one day and decided to do it.”
“It’s pretty raw,” Eustis says. “The whole record’s completely out of tune. All of the synths are out of tune, everything’s out of tune slightly. Most of that was intentional.”
