Radio Tank Mix

by A. G. Cook

A. G. Cook - Radio Tank Mix

Ratings

Music: ★★★☆☆ (3.5/5)

Sound: ☆☆☆☆☆ (0.0/5)

Review

**Radio Tank Mix: A. G. Cook's Hyperkinetic Masterpiece**

In the sprawling digital landscape of hyperpop, few figures loom as large as A. G. Cook, the mad scientist behind PC Music and the architect of some of the most gleefully disruptive sounds of the 2010s. While his seven-album opus "7G" might be his most ambitious statement, it's the chaotic brilliance of "Radio Tank Mix" that truly captures Cook at his most unhinged and essential. This isn't just an album—it's a sugar-rushed fever dream that sounds like the internet having an anxiety attack in the best possible way.

Cook's journey to this point reads like a manifesto for musical rebellion. After founding PC Music in 2013, he became the puppet master behind a collective that included GFOTY, Hannah Diamond, and most famously, Charli XCX, transforming the British pop star into a hyperpop icon. His early work was deliberately artificial, almost confrontationally synthetic, taking pop music's most saccharine elements and cranking them up until they became something entirely alien yet oddly familiar.

"Radio Tank Mix" represents Cook firing on all cylinders, a hyperkinetic journey through fractured pop that feels like channel-surfing through parallel dimensions where every radio station is slightly broken. The album's genius lies in its complete abandonment of traditional song structure in favor of something that resembles a DJ set designed by someone who's never actually heard music before, only had it described to them by an overexcited teenager.

The standout track "Being Harsh" perfectly encapsulates Cook's approach—what begins as a relatively straightforward pop song quickly dissolves into a kaleidoscope of pitch-shifted vocals, stuttering beats, and melodic fragments that seem to exist in multiple time signatures simultaneously. It's exhausting and exhilarating, like being trapped inside a malfunctioning video game soundtrack. Meanwhile, "Xxoplex" pushes even further into abstract territory, sounding like Aphex Twin collaborating with a dial-up modem, yet somehow maintaining an undeniable pop sensibility beneath all the digital chaos.

"Crimson and Clover" serves as perhaps the album's most accessible moment, though accessibility is relative in Cook's universe. Here, he takes the classic Tommy James and the Shondells track and subjects it to his particular brand of sonic torture, stretching and compressing the familiar melody until it becomes something entirely new while remaining hauntingly recognizable. It's a perfect microcosm of Cook's entire artistic project—taking the familiar and making it wonderfully, disturbingly strange.

The album's production is characteristically maximal, with every available frequency seemingly occupied by some form of digital debris. Cook layers sounds with the enthusiasm of someone who's just discovered they can have as many tracks as they want in their DAW, but there's method to this madness. Beneath the surface chaos lies a sophisticated understanding of pop songcraft, even if that craft has been fed through a blender and reassembled by artificial intelligence.

What makes "Radio Tank Mix" particularly compelling is how it functions as both a celebration and a critique of digital culture. Cook seems simultaneously in love with and horrified by the endless stream of content that defines modern life, and this album captures that duality perfectly. It's music for the ADHD generation, designed for listeners whose attention spans have been shattered by constant connectivity.

In the broader context of Cook's career, "Radio Tank Mix" represents a crucial bridge between his early, more conceptual PC Music work and his later, more commercially palatable productions. It's here that he perfected the art of making the unlistenable somehow irresistible, a skill he'd later deploy to great effect in his work with mainstream artists.

Today, Cook's influence can be heard everywhere from TikTok to the Billboard Hot 100, as hyperpop has evolved from underground curiosity to legitimate pop subgenre. "Radio Tank Mix" stands as a crucial document of this transformation, capturing the moment when Cook's vision was too strange for the mainstream but too infectious to ignore. It remains his most purely distilled statement of intent—a manifesto written in compressed audio and auto-tuned chaos that continues to sound like the future, even as that future rapidly becomes the present.

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