Atomic Houdini weaves music and painting for ‘synergy’ Reporting and writing by Kyle Cochrun he music and visual art of Chelan Riebe, aka Atomic Houdini, poses questions about the complex and seemingly ineffable latticework separating avant-garde boundary conditions and pop song accessibility, as well as slightly less interesting questions about influence and art as stylistic mélange meticulously crafted until genre tropes mutate beyond distinguishability, like an extra thick stew that’s been stirred so long you can barely recognize the ingredients.
“[Dandelion Fireworks] is the music that I was working on colliding with the interest that I had in painting, and then trying to create some sort of synergy between the two,” Chelan says. “[The album] came from me feeling that there were a lot of beautiful things in my life that were dying. Instead of holding on to these dying things, art allows us to embrace the impermanence, like blowing away seeds on a dandelion to let the wind plant something new. So the album is about the rebirth of relationships, creating new things with people, places, art.”
I met Chelan on the second floor of the Jenks building on Front Street in Cuyahoga Falls to discuss Dandelion Fireworks, his multimedia project consisting of an album’s worth of recorded music and a galleryshowing’s worth of oil paintings that correspond to each song, pushing forward and compounding on the themes and ideas embedded within each densely-layered track.
Chelan’s original idea for the project was to set up gallery showings. Each painting would have a QR code that viewers could scan with their phones, which would open a Bandcamp page containing the corresponding song and lyrics. Ideally, each patron would bring headphones and listen to the songs while viewing the paintings. “I finished drafting these songs quite awhile back and tried to figure out
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how I’d go about releasing them. I was thinking, ‘I want to paint more this upcoming winter,’ and I had already made the track artwork for each of the songs. I thought, ‘What if I use the digital artwork I already have as a reference point and try turning these into oil paintings?’” Chelan completed a trial run of the show at the Negative Space art gallery in Cleveland. However, the COVID-19 pandemic brought tour plans to a halt. “I think it was a good idea,” Chelan says. “It just landed at the wrong time.” Musically, Dandelion Fireworks consists of 12 vividly textured indietronic pop songs in the same vein as Animal Collective (Chelan’s primary musical inspiration), Passion Pit (but a touch looser) and Phoenix (but a lot weirder). The melodies are catchy. The tone color is consistently remarkable. Sounds bubble, spurt, scrape, snap, gush and blast
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through headphones, the ideal way to listen. As sonic experience, Dandelion Fireworks is rich to the point of superabundance, at times sounding like a lustrous pop-forward successor to Brian Eno’s studio-ascompositional-tool approach. “Dandelion Fireworks is completely software-based outside of vocals and field recordings gathered for sampling,” Chelan says. “I tend to move from one thing to the next very quickly. I want to explore new ideas and play around with different sounds.” Chelan’s exploratory instinct is evident in the playful sonic flourishes spattered throughout Dandelion Fireworks. Album opener “Static Hymn” includes eight-bit melody blocks reminiscent of primitive Super Mario games. “Laughter Like” cakes reverberant sheen all over the inimitable Roland TR 808 cowbell. The vocals on “Water Rising” project from a tidepool of sound effects that layer electronic ripples over Chelan’s thedevilstrip.com
