Aside from a few magazine reviews of his albums lovingly scanned and uploaded to his website, the work of Ditto has largely slipped by unnoticed. Passed around by synth aficionados and MIDI historians, his works seemed confined to academic obscurity, a late 80s curiosity collecting dust until late last year, when Youtube user “no obi, no insert” uploaded the album “In Human Terms” onto the site. And dastardly as that pesky algorithm may be, if you feed it a steady diet of strange ambient or foreign synth pop, it’ll have to start listening to you...eventually.
This is where Kasra Kurt and Ada Babar finally found the record, recently uploaded and lingering on “no obi”’s page. The two fell in love instantly. “I was surprised by how contemporary the album sounded,” Kasra says, “It has this nostalgic, post-romantic vibe that still somehow feels uplifting and sincere.”
They quickly looked for ways to contact Charles Ditto, and found a .edu email account - the synth master now teaches music at Texas State University. Ditto was keen to have the record re-released, giving Ada and Kasra free rein to “do whatever” with it through their cassette label, Nino Tomorrow. In giving it a physical form once again, they’ve brought a lost classic back right on time to catch the ambient pop resurgence.
Indeed, the most shocking feature of In Human Terms is how contemporary the sounds are, a phenomenon that Kasra credits to the album’s subtle rhythmic shifts and sparsely melodic character. On certain tracks, like the appropriately titled opener “Pop,” it’s easy to hear the album as a series of backing tracks to an ambient pop song from the likes of NNA Tapes favorites and synth weirdos Erica Eso or even Kasra’s band Palm–the soft polyrhythms gently undulate beneath blindingly bright synths, finding that perfect middle ground between meditation and exhilaration. “Rock” is another standout, with countermelodies weaving about each other in 5/4. The way they merge into a confused but propulsive mega-melody calls to mind a machine taking its first awkward steps, gradually picking up confidence.
The textures here do tend towards retro-futuristic, almost to the point of cheesiness. Invoking a bit of whimsy himself, Ditto’s website refers to the music as a form of alien life, “a curious music...discovered on a peculiar, but exotic MIDI-capable little planet.” It’s an apt expression, as the songs do seem to breathe with an convincingly organic character. “World Anthem” whirls and dances, gliding on synthesized voices that pulse in and out to close side one, which Ditto names the “High” side, like a wonky fanfare. Side two, “Low”, begins with a massive shift in “Prisoner Waltz,” whose elongated, breezy textures mingle with nature sounds for a cosmic brain massage. Like the best ambient music, In Human Terms works best when it works for the listener. True to the album title, tracks like “Christmas Before the War” seem to meet you exactly where you are, embracing you gently rather than flinging you into the deep end.
The “Low” side of the record is altogether more calming, dialing down the percussion while bringing in some guest instrumentation to keep your interest piqued. The saxophone on “Western” is a particularly nice addition; hearing it in duet against the icey keyboard textures is a real treat, so much so that when it returns only briefly on closer “Basso Contrato,” it sounds like a beautiful memory snatched up in the song’s tumbling post-rock rhythm.
In Human Terms is the work of a master machinist playing mimic–bending emerging technology to see just how close he can come to passing a musical Turing test. In a twist of irony, in failing to render a perfect copy, Ditto’s MIDI-capable machine universe sounds too human to ignore.
