On White Flight:
White Flight is a cacophonous collage of disparate musical ideas that don’t even try to coexist and make sense together. They simply pile up, one on top of the other, and be the listener the one to make sense of the Babelic confusion. The first two songs are misleading in their melodic simplicity. “Now” is a demented, heavily-arranged aria that sounds like a collaboration between VanDyke Parks and Syd Barrett. “Pastora Divine” is a pastoral psychedelic singalong that Kevin Ayers could have concocted in the 1970s if backed by the Velvet Underground. By the third one, any pretense of logic begins to fall apart. The somnolent sparse blues “Solarsphere” is ripped apart by a roaring hard-rock riff and drowns in ambient-lysergic madness. “The Condition” and the jazz-electronic mayhem of “Timeshaker” evoke the anarchic psychedelic freak-outs of Red Crayola; while the disjointed chant with wah-wah organ of “Oz Icaro” and the brief exotic dance of “Galactic Seed” evoke the acid-folk eruptions of the Holy Modal Rounders, except that Roelofs employs a different generation of devices: breakbeats, digital noise, sound effects, vocal effects, non-rock instruments to conjure a sense of poetic detachment from anything that music is supposed to be. Roelofs ends the album in the tone that is more pensive and philosophical, and musically more convoluted, of “Deathhands” and “The Secret Sound.” His extreme message is the hyper-syncopated drum’n’bass and free-jazz hemorrage of “Superconductor” that ends with a cryptic whistle in a bed of crickets.