Africa Baby, Yeah Yeah Yeah

Applied Communications is the pseudonym of virile young transit poet, Max Wood. Max was born in Florida in the '80s and raised on the indie-rock tastes of his Sub-Pop employee mother and her various B-list rock star friends, spending holidays with the likes of The Dwarves and getting creepy phone calls from Rick James. Given a four-track, a strange sequencer/drum-machine/midi box, and a Casio mt-46 at age 12, he started to make exceptionally strange music. He made tapes of it and distributed them to strangers at record stores, art openings, shows of bands that he liked, and at his own shows, which occurred only at neighborhood laundromats, art museum auditoriums, Jewish community centers, and bus stations. His new album, "Africa Baby, Yeah Yeah Yeah," works as a sound-collage of sorts, developing within several different genres and then creating something new by reinterpreting different style conventions and mixing many unlikely elements. With his blend of dense layers of techno dancebeats and string sections, jazz-inspired horns, and not-quite-rapping vocal delivery, Applied Communications comes across like a modernized Grandmaster Flash meets Henry Mancini. "Genre-bending, warped experimentation." --Indie Workshop