samplers, drum machines and the beautiful musical chaos of Eat Cloud

When the robots try to take over the world, the only person  able to stop them will be Eat Cloud. He will be the one to provides the soundtrack to world destruction, and it will be the sound of beautiful chaos. Music will eat itself, and out of its ashes will be electronic drums pulsing all over. The master of these drums will be head banging and thrashing about, pushing buttons and slamming pedals to get the sound that is midnight. The robots will begin to dance and gyrate and bust into makeshift soul train lines, and some of the newer androids will even start break dancing. Then the music will stop and a haunting melody will attack as Eat Cloud drops the drums and begins to play a song on a guitar and bow that seems birthed out of the lost sadness found in the hearts of abandoned children. The robots will begin to weep and through their tears they will self destruct as Eat Cloud saves the world for mankind.

In the world that is Eat Cloud (government name Andrew David Tomasello), the robot scenario might actually happen. He may be making music to one day save the world, and it may be Tomasello’s only connection left to reality. It’s as if he sees the world through the eyes of a 5-year-old trapped in a Super Mario Brothers cartoon who can’t decide if he wants to save the princess, or just hang out and chill with the walking mushrooms. Talking to the 21-year-old, you find a kind soul who seems to have stepped straight out of the “Dazed and Confused” movie, complete with shaggy hair, cigarette hanging out of his mouth, and a laid back, “everything is cool, man” disposition.

Tomasello is definitely “cool.” He’s a one-man band who seems like he can play virtually any instrument in the world. He’s moonlighting on guitar these days with Portsmouth’s favorite noisy rock band, the Antithesisters, but his real talent is in his ability to manipulate drum machines and samplers into beautiful syncopated chaos. He released his first album under the Eat Cloud moniker a few months back after four years of trying to realize the sound that was violently trying to erupt from his mind. Tomasello describes the process as a lot of trial and error and the evolution of trying to find a new sound.

“I just always liked music I found to be intense,” he explains. This need to create an outlet for intense music led him to buy a drum machine at the age of 17 so that he could make a grind core record. It was a fusion of noise, hardcore, metal and thrash for a thick sound of aggression.

“I did a few noise songs on there and I never played a show with it, I just had a record,” he says. “From 17 till 19 I was pretty much locked up in my room screwing around with tapes, mostly doing really odd folky type music, but I got a really cheap sampler and started doing things with that and just the drum machine and thought it was crazy, then I started hooking up guitar pedals to the sampler and so on till I realized what could happen with certain equipment.”

So far, it’s working for him.

“I came out of hardcore mainly because I did not like how violent it was,” he explains of his departure from his hardcore roots and immersion into this current electronic sound. “It has really just been a lot of personal trial and error from the start, learning what I can and can’t do and teaching myself to do the things I can do that I didn’t think I could.”

What emerged is an assault on sound that’s a melding of Aphex Twin melody and electronics with J Dilla drum patterns—that is, if J Dilla did way too much acid while watching seven naked hippy chicks gyrate to bass music while they were reading passages from William Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch.” The one golden rule Eat Cloud follows is that he records all his music live straight to a four-track with no studio trickery, overdubs, or the aid of computers. He can’t see himself ever using computers.

“I need to be able to feel the music, and manipulate it with a human touch, and I am afraid I will lose this ability if I used computers,” he says.

If you are looking to buy his new album, just walk around downtown Dover and sooner or later you’re sure to see him shredding about searching for the elusive brown note. Or, you can just visit his MySpace page (myspace.com/eatcloud) where you can download a few songs and get in contact with the man himself. He recently quit his job at Bullmoose Records in Salem, N.H., and is looking to make the Seacoast his new home. In the meantime he’s couch surfing and living strictly off the money he makes from his live shows and CD sales.

“A lot of promoters are scared off by the sound because it’s really odd music,” he explains, “but the Seacoast has embraced it and really motivated me to keep going. The music itself is the most important thing to me.”

Eat Cloud is a human robot connecting to the world through beeps and drum patterns. When the end of the world comes, that may be exactly what we need.