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THE OUTSIDE is gonna take some getting used to. I am not sure what Eliot Lipp is doing here, if he is moving the electronica genre closer to mainstream, or even retro, pop, or vice versa. I initially put THE OUTSIDE on the system anticipating…well, what one anticipates when one puts an electronica/dance project on a sound system. THE OUTSIDE is a dance project, no doubt about it; the title track, however, which opens the project, could have been a track buried deep within one of those instrumental album projects in the early 1960s. Not The Ventures, necessarily, more like Dave “Baby” Cortez or something like that. Things get a bit more predictable with “Opening Ceremony,” which is built upon a riff that sounds like the sampled groan of an intergalactic refrigerator on E.T.’s mothership, but that is not necessarily better. For ‘better,” you’ve got the funky faux guitar riff that opens “The Area,” which functions as a prelude to a sampled steel drum --- is that really what that is? --- melody line that runs throughout the track.

There is a mid-period in THE OUTSIDE where it seems to slide into Tangerine Dream land, becoming not so much dance music as background noise to a soundtrack --- during “Beyond The City and “See What It‘s About” I swear, I could almost see the raindrops on the windshield during the car chasing Denzel Washington down an alley --- and when it slides out you’re into a “Seven Mile Tunnel” which seems to be a mostly successful effort to meld African percussion with western dance music.

There are parts of THE OUTSIDE, particularly “The Machine And” which seem as if it was overly dependent upon MY LIFE IN THE BUSH OF GHOSTS for inspiration. There are certainly worse things that one could have for an influence --- and heaven knows that Lipp is not the first --- but                                                                                                                        even that Rosetta Stone has perhaps been overused by this point, some 30 years on. That may not be fair, however, given that Lipp himself credits a host of influences --- Detroit and Bay Area rap and Chicago post-rock along with classic electronica and synth rock --- and frequent geographical upheavals (born in Tacoma, he has lived in San Francisco, Chicago, L.A., and now calls New York his residence). THE OUTSIDE may be a breakthrough into the next big thing or the sound of a producer continuing to find his way. Time will tell.