Like a well-paced slasher flick, Lil_Babeee_4EVA knows when to ratchet up the tension and anticipation with his debut, White Noise Machine.
I haven’t bothered to fact-check this yet, but I’m pretty sure that, if not the first, Maarten Bayliss is among a select few artists featured on DOMINIONATED with their own IMDb page. He has an impressive list of acting, producing, writing, directing, and composing credits to his name, but it’s his work as a “lo-fi electro-post-punk wunderkind” that first put him on my radar. Bayliss has been blowing away those in the know for years with his eclectic and erratic approach to electronic experimentalism as exemplified on White Noise Machine, his debut under the Lil_Babeee_4EVA name.
He calls these tracks “horror movie dance music,” but the emphasis should be on music rather than horror. Bayliss’s cinematic sensibilities fill the frame right from the start. Opener “Hard to Say” and early single “Caterpillar March” establish White Noise Machine’s premise of sophisticated dance rhythms and atmospheric ambient overtones punctuated by “filtered white noise used as hi-hats” throughout the album’s nine songs. Like any well-paced slasher flick, Bayliss knows when to ratchet up the tension and anticipation (“Cut Up”), when to take his foot off the gas and give listeners a chance to decompress and catch their breath (“Andya”) and when to do both in the same song (“Green Rain,” “Work Plz”).
The most endearing and enduring element of White Noise Machine is Bayliss’s sense of humour and inability to take himself too seriously. From the project’s tongue-in-cheek name (inspired by a Hotmail name generator) and stocking-faced-wig-wearing evil-incarnate persona to the juxtaposition of light and dark tones and harsh and soft sounds, Lil_Babeee_4EVA is so good at what he does it’s scary. White Noise Machine is a blockbuster in any genre you try and slot it into. No rotten tomatoes here.
