Packaged in a simple digipack that contains no mention of the artist or album title, containing liner notes written in HTML code, and featuring an amorphous, not always melodic collage of sound, Bizzart’s Future Stars and Small Wonders is a difficult album to get a proper handle on.
At its most basic, Future Stars is an indie hip hop album by former spoken-word artist-turned-emcee Arthur Arellanes, but this description ignores the glitch-heavy electronics that dominate the album, which in turn ignores the piano-led singsong numbers. Confounding though the album may occasionally be, it’s equally captivating. Unexpected left turns are far more common here than a recognizable verse-chorus-verse structure. Bizzart flits from the dying computer sounds of early Prefuse 73 to acoustic guitar and handclaps, instrumentals to moments that could pass for collaborations with Kid A-era Radiohead, to delicate ballads and samples about aquatic reproduction.
Ultimately, this hodgepodge leaves Future Stars a bit of a mess, with no real through line to pull it together, but that was likely Arellanes’s intention. The album is an obfuscated listen, but it’s also a rewarding one.
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