OK Bamboo begins with lithe melodic movements of piano delicately textured with soft stutter and glitch. Made us envision a milky complected android awaking with an itch to drowsily scratch. Then this android opens her mouth briefly to yawn-murmur-sing a few mysterious words before diving into the green-blue waves to frolic with some remarkably lifelike animatronic sea creatures. Aaaah, maybe you'll trip out to it differently than we did, but we hope you get an inkling of Hasunuma's distinctly Japanese dream-tronica.
Collected works (live, as the title states) from the man behind OR Records (responsible for a slew of excellent experimental / electronic discs from artists like Zbigniew Karkowski, Francisco Lopez, Farmer's Manual, CD_Slopper, etc.). You might recognize Haswell's name as he's remixed Merzbow (Scumtron) and Thurston Moore (Root) as well as collaborated with the former on a 12" put
Japanese laptop jockey Chihei Hatakeyama has flattened the source material of guitar and vibraphone into the tasteful ambient construction found on Minima Moralia, dreamy drones dotted with fizzing digital pixelations. There's none of the attack and rhythm that might pinpoint Hatakeyama's source material; instead he produces warm, dreamy drifts of ringing tones and velvety buzzings that locate the album in the realm of Eno's ambience (in terms of composition) and Kompakt's beloved Pop Ambient series (in terms of warmth via use of analogue / digital dialoguing). Very pleasant listening.
Another list, another lovely sonic missive from local boutique label Time Released Sound, and odds are, long time readers of the list know just what to expect from a TRS release, something drifty and dreamy, ambient and cinematic, blissed out and shimmery, subtle electronics, maybe strings, hushed dronemusic, maybe pastoral, maybe subtly sinister, sometime sun dappled and tranquil, other times dark and melancholic, but always sonically stunning, and of course, elaborately packaged.
This time around, it's another new discovery, at least for us, a soundscaper from Iran named Porya Hatami, who weaves delicate expanses of crystalline ambience, lush, billowy smears of soft focus thrum, beneath softly reverbed piano, subtle swoonsome strings, the sound a languorous slow build, but not to any bombastic climax, instead, setting layer upon layer, the sound growing ever more dense, and deep, with swirls of spacey synth deftly woven into sprawls of dreamlike, nocturnal swells. Haunting, softly distorted pulsations spread out like beacons in a thick sonic fog, the overtones bleeding into one another and creating a thick blanket of warm reveberant shimmer, each track here part of a greater whole, a lush, tranquil, serenely psychedelic kosmische ambience that seems to expand ever outward, enveloping the listener in an electronic flecked, dream-ambient web of ethereal sound.
As always, there are two versions, both fantastically packaged, the deluxe version this time around, limited to just 75 copies, comes housed in a hand assembled and 'artified' sewn booklet full of aeronautic ephemera, this is in turn housed in a laser-cut, vintage hardback book cover, each inset with an antique glass identification slide. Inside there's lots more, runway diagrams, old airport photos, flight instruction manuals as well as actual pages from vintage pilot's logbooks, and finally a vintage aeronautic snapshot as well. As if that weren't enough, the cd comes in a vintage airmail envelope, and in the spine of each booklet is a vintage pencil! Phew! There's also a standard version, that one limited to 150 copies, the disc housed in a swank full color digipak.
Another list, another lovely sonic missive from local boutique label Time Released Sound, and odds are, long time readers of the list know just what to expect from a TRS release, something drifty and dreamy, ambient and cinematic, blissed out and shimmery, subtle electronics, maybe strings, hushed dronemusic, maybe pastoral, maybe subtly sinister, sometime sun dappled and tranquil, other times dark and melancholic, but always sonically stunning, and of course, elaborately packaged.
This time around, it's another new discovery, at least for us, a soundscaper from Iran named Porya Hatami, who weaves delicate expanses of crystalline ambience, lush, billowy smears of soft focus thrum, beneath softly reverbed piano, subtle swoonsome strings, the sound a languorous slow build, but not to any bombastic climax, instead, setting layer upon layer, the sound growing ever more dense, and deep, with swirls of spacey synth deftly woven into sprawls of dreamlike, nocturnal swells. Haunting, softly distorted pulsations spread out like beacons in a thick sonic fog, the overtones bleeding into one another and creating a thick blanket of warm reveberant shimmer, each track here part of a greater whole, a lush, tranquil, serenely psychedelic kosmische ambience that seems to expand ever outward, enveloping the listener in an electronic flecked, dream-ambient web of ethereal sound.
As always, there are two versions, both fantastically packaged, the deluxe version this time around, limited to just 75 copies, comes housed in a hand assembled and 'artified' sewn booklet full of aeronautic ephemera, this is in turn housed in a laser-cut, vintage hardback book cover, each inset with an antique glass identification slide. Inside there's lots more, runway diagrams, old airport photos, flight instruction manuals as well as actual pages from vintage pilot's logbooks, and finally a vintage aeronautic snapshot as well. As if that weren't enough, the cd comes in a vintage airmail envelope, and in the spine of each booklet is a vintage pencil! Phew! There's also a standard version, that one limited to 150 copies, the disc housed in a swank full color digipak.
Record number two for the Emeralds' synthesist on Kranky; and like pretty much everything from that prolific trio, Hauschildt's sonic fruit doesn't fall too far from the Emeralds tree. Where his cohorts delve more into emotionally saturated post-kraut explorations of guitar and synth, Hauschildt's ethos tends more toward a grid-snapped electronica with taut sequencing and the occasional drum machine pulse, and he's probably the responsible party for bringing the beatbox to the 2012 Emeralds album Just To Feel Anything. He reprises those electronic rhythms once again on about half the tracks here, and those rhythms are anything but heavy and deep. Their airy spaciousness is only outdone by Hauschildt's luminously bright arppegiations, melodic sequences, and faux-chorale vocal samples that again look back to Vangelis and Jean-Michel Jarre for inspiration. While the more rigid tracks with their LFO squelching and vintage synth stabs come across at best as a decent attempt at Kraftwerk homage (e.g. "Accelerated Yearning") and at worst pre-fab soft-porn fluff (e.g. "Constant Reminders"), he's much better when he applies his craft to the atmospheric and the cosmic sensibilities of a track like the ethereal "Kept" and the gauzy, lovely title track.
Both Mark McGuire and John "Blue Randa" Elliott maintain quite a public profile outside their work in the kosmische synth-guitar trio Emeralds, but the third member of that outift, Steve Hauschildt, has remained relatively quiet. We had a super limited cd-r of his solo work on Gneiss Things which came and went in a just a few days, but beyond that, nothing outside Emeralds. Tragedy & Geometry is Hauschildt's first full album beyond a small and unavailable selection of cassettes, and it's found a suitable home on Kranky. If McGuire and Elliott have embarked on parallel trajectories for effervescent, impressionist ambience through guitar and synth respectively, Hauschildt's own vision is that of the machinist - ratcheting the electronic percolations that he brings to Emeralds within very precise grids and architectural blocks for his electronics to operate. Oneohtrix Point Never is also obsessed with the mathematical poetics of electronic music; but where OPN always skews his retrogarde flares through lost time, Russian mistranslation or sci-fi replication, Hauschildt adopts a tightly controlled rigor in his engineered electronica. Nowhere is that more true than on "Batteries May Drain", with its clockwork drum machine ticking at autobahn speeds amidst rasping motorik electronics and comet dusted synth melodies, in line with Jean-Michel Jarre and Vangelis. Elsewhere, hints of Emeralds' signature bittersweet atmospheres seep through the pulsing arpeggiations and synthesizer swoosh, aligned on tracks such as the "Overnight Venusian" which alludes to Aphex Twin's heralded Selected Ambient Works Vol. II. Quite fine!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
A 'repress' of a cd-r that we never got the first time around. Mr. Hauschildt is one of the three members of Emeralds; but unlike John Elliott and Mark McGuire, he doesn't seem to be as prolific in terms of solo and side projects, with less than a half-dozen tape and cd-r releases to speak of (compared to mountains of material from those other two). With The Critique Of The Beautiful, Hauschildt doesn't stray too far from the Emeralds sound of kosmiche dronescaping through analog synths and pedals. The album is dying to be made into a piece of vinyl, with the first four pieces acting as one suite that would be nicely matched by the lengthy finale. One of those first four - "What One Does To Another" - has almost a brightened Tim Hecker feel with percolating melodic phases piled below a thickened mass of warmly buzzed distortion. This is followed by "Runway" lovely post-Cluster track of pastoral synthesis built from a rhythmic arpeggiation anchored by a spiralling set of sequential notes and tone-bent phrases. And that extended finale opens with an oscillating flange of church organ minimalism, settling upon a melancholy melody which slowly shifts between just a few minor key notes which gradually wanders into zoned-out passages of electronic bubbling and fizzed textures. Very beautiful, very moving stuff.
Limited stock on this, so don't be surprised when this one sells out.
Now available on vinyl, in a condensed, editted form.
Richie Hawtin (aka Plastikman) really wants you to know the concept behind this album. So, in his own words, here it is: "After recording, sampling, cutting and splicing over 100 tracks down to their most basic components, I ended up with a collection of over 300 loops, ranging from 1 note to 4 bars. I then started to recreate and reinterpret each track, putting the pieces back together as if an audio jigsaw puzzle -- using effects and edits as the glue in between each piece. This represents what those loops became and how their interactions created something that had not existed before."
Well, not exactly.
In reconstructing his decontructed history of Detroit / Berlin techno, Hawtin hasn't really "created something which had not existed before" as much as he's stated the obvious: the techno rhythm is wholly interchangeable. There, of course, are differences amongst the work of Wolfgang Voigt, Carl Craig, Maurizio, Stewart Walker, and Richie Hawtin... but their use of techno's rhythm is all virtually identical. Thus, in cutting all of those tracks down to a near molecular level (where the sampled sounds don't much opportunity to manifest their uniqueness), Hawtin is purposefully not emphasizing techno's aesthetic individuality, but its ultimate uniformity. So, Hawtin's "DE9: Closer To The Edit" may technically be something new, but it really sounds exactly like what techno should sound like -- big 909 or 808 four-on-the-floor drum kicks with tight cybernetic arpeggiations.
This is NOT a slight against this record, it's just that Hawtin has failed in achieving his lofty goals, BUT Hawtin has created a really great techno record, sounding just like Jeff Mills' "X-103" or his previous "Decks, EFX, and 909."
Richie Hawtin (aka Plastikman) really wants you to know the concept behind this album. So, in his own words, here it is: "After recording, sampling, cutting and splicing over 100 tracks down to their most basic components, I ended up with a collection of
Well, not exactly.
In reconstructing his decontructed history of Detroit / Berlin techno, Hawtin hasn't really "created something which had not existed before" as much as he's stated the obvious: the techno rhythm is wholly interchangeable. There, of course, are differences amongst the work of Wolfgang Voigt, Carl Craig, Maurizio Bianchi, Stewart Walker, and Richie Hawtin... but their use of techno's rhythm is all virtually identical. Thus, in cutting all of those tracks down to a near molecular level (where the sampled sounds don't much opportunity to manifest their uniqueness), Hawtin is purposefully not emphasizing techno's aesthetic individuality, but its ultimate uniformity. So, Hawtin's "DE9: Closer To The Edit" may technically be something new, but it really sounds exactly like what techno should sound like -- big 909 or 808 four-on-the-floor drum kicks with tight cybernetic arpeggiations.
This is NOT a slight against this record, it's just that Hawtin has failed in achieving his lofty goals, BUT Hawtin has created a really great techno record, sounding just like Jeff Mills' "X-103" or his previous "Decks, EFX, and 909."
Orange is Richie Hawtin's tribute to Yello and built claustrophobic Detroit tech-house remix of Yello's 'Oh Yeah', sounding more like the early Plus 8 singles than the recent Plastikman output. Anyway, it's packaged in those cute cd cases that look like they should hold contraceptives.
It seems Haxan Cloak has gone through a bit of a reinvention. Up until now, we would have classified Haxan Cloak as psychedelic folk, their previous records darkly ritualistic, with urgently strummed acoustic guitars, swirling black ambience, chanted monk like vox, moaning cello rumbles, a fluttery folkiness that seemed more in keeping with industrial neo folk outfits like Death In June. Which raises the question, how did they end up on Triangle, and how did they end up sounding like Burial and Vessel and Raime? Not that we're complaining. We can't get enough of this new strain of slo-mo soul, dubbed out minimal electronic murk, and that's pretty much what Haxan Cloak deliver on their Triangle debut. Sure much of the moodiness and black ambience of their previous sound carries over, but then that's the perfect delivery system for spare, skeletal, glitched out rhythms, and Excavation definitely straddles the line between new and old Haxan Cloak, peppering black drifts of deep rumble, and keening sine wave tones, with weird sampled voices, and shimmering Tibetan bowls, but soon that tell tale Burial style wood-block snare sound comes in, all echoey and reverbed, and the song transforms into a blackened electro creep, the background sounds swooping ominously, soft swells of hiss and grit wreath the rhythm, the mix a bit warped as well, the sound pulsing, laced with thick bursts of ominous thrum cranked WAY louder than everything around it, creating a secondary rhythm, one that's even more woozy.
Which is pretty much how the rest of the record plays out, and perhaps exactly what you might expect from a formerly psych folk / black ambient technician gone electronic. In fact, strip away the beats, and this would be some harrowing black ambience, but it really is all about the beats, as much as the textures and moody ambience. In some places, the sound slips into an almost dubstep, but a hellish ultra minimal, avant dubstep, a swirling swath of fractured blurred samples, glitched out beats, and rib cage rattling low end.
The shorter tracks here seems to drift back toward the Haxan Cloak of old, with scraped cello string rumbles, keening distant melodies, echo drenched industrial plod, ominous minor key piano stabs, but the two 2-part epics here definitely have the new sound on full display, channeling a Burial like minimal dub, and the more spare haunting minimal abstract beatscaping of recent aQ faves Raime, filtering it through Haxan Cloak's sinister black ambient industrial filter, the results might be one of the darkest, meanest sounding electronic records ever. The second half of the record finds some melody filtering through, the second half of "The Mirror Reflecting", is almost pretty, although still fractured and fucked up, but it builds to a seriously psychedelic coda, before the relatively brief "Dieu" delivers the most straight ahead electro jam here, but it's really relative, freaky vocal snippets, swirling strings, buzzing bass thrum, fragmented rhythmic skitter, ominous pulsating melodies, it's almost like an intro for the massive 13 minute closer "The Drop", which ditches beats completely for the first half of the track, instead, weaving a lush undulating landscape of shimmering chiming melodies, moaning strings, deep bass pulsations, lysergic chordal swirls, everything hazy and washed out, the beats do eventually surface, but they're more like processed low end throbs, looped beneath the song's haunting almost orchestral sounding swirl, the beats becoming almost Kompakt worthy for the last half, but the blackened surrounding sounds, and the weirdly static churn of the main single beat rhythm, keeps the track from getting at all 'dance-y', the beats merely adding texture to the song's blurred and blackened abject sonic sprawl. The sort of seriously sinister, cinematic soundscaping that transform any dancefloors into a crushing, harrowing, black pit of sonic despair. Awesome!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Just buy this record. If you've never heard it, then by all means you must. And if you liked them before, I know you've been dying for the definitive cd reissue of what is quite possibly one of the coolest records of the eighties.
Originally released in 1983, Haysi Fantayzee were a boy/girl duo (with a behind the scenes 3rd member), sort of a mix between Toto Coelo ('I Eat Cannibal') and Sigue Sigue Sputnik. Super catchy and super stupid. Plus I'm sure you all remember that song 'Shiny Shiny' which was their big hit.
And Kate Garner, the irrestable chanteuse from Haysi Fantayzee, was my first punk rock crush: I mean, a half shirt, leg warmers, fishnet body stocking, leather codpiece, dreadlocks, and an upside down cross on her forehead(!), what was a 13 year old boy to do?! Except maybe masturbate furiously.
This reissue has two bonus tracks and five remixes and is of course, highly recommended by Andee.
Ethiopiques meets Torch Of The Mystics? Cambodian pop meets Turkish psych rock? Freaked out surf rock meets Saharan guitar music? Howabout all of the above...?
The very first release on the Sun City Girls' Sublime Frequency label from Istanbul-based instrumental psychedelic surf / space rock band Hayvanlar Alemi, their first vinyl lp, and their first record readily available outside of Turkey.
The thing that makes this Hayvanlar Alemi record work in the context of Sublime Frequencies, is that it borrows from a super varied set of sounds, from all sorts of musics, each track here sounding like it could possibly be from some other SF release, twanged out desert psych, moody Eastern garage pop, fuzzy druggy almost krautrock style drift, a few of the tracks even sound like they could be some Sun City Girls Torch Of The Mystics B side! But somehow these guys make all those different sounds work, this whole record holds together perfectly and flows like a proper album, a super expansive and sonically rich collection of modern psychedelia, beholden to all the various musics that came before.
The sound on Guarana Superpower is definitely exotic, lush, with Eastern melodies, simple hypnotic percussion, long droning tones, looped motorik grooves, plenty of buzz, and jangle, and crunch, rhythms that veer from spare and skeletal to wild and splattery, songs drift from tranquil shimmer to meditative buzz to occasional blasts of full on chaotic freaked out in-the-red psychedelia, but even in the midst of those noisy squalls, the instrumentation is distinctly Eastern, the result some fantastical Eastern psychedelic noise rock. It's during those moments that the Torch Of The Mystics comparisons become even more apt. The record is of course rife with references to traditional Turkish folk music, Turkish classical music, sixties and seventies Turkish psych rock, as well as all the above mentioned NON Turkish sounds and influences, all filtered through a modern avant rock sensibility. There are a few tracks of surfy, bluesy garage rock stomp as well, but again, even those jams are infused with a vibe and energy that is way more Eastern than Western. So good. And such a perfect fit for Sublime Frequencies...
As always, this is a super limited one time vinyl pressing, nice thick vinyl, housed in a heavy old school style tip-on jacket.
RSI is another UK label trafficking in difficult and totally original electronic music (like countrymates Fflint Central). It's a shame that they only make cd-rs. I find it hard to believe they wouldn't be able to sell 1000 cds, but it hardly makes a difference, because this stuff is so good.
Headtrapcrashman was a definite contender for my record of the week. A static-y, scratchy, noisy masterpiece. Loping and melodic pianos, and gently plucked acoustic guitar, and whirring organs play simple melodic lines while a storm of wheezing and whining high end and washes of swelling fuzz roar in the background. Punctuated by bursts of rumblng bass and chopped up vocal snippets, sinister whispers and the occasional hiccupping drum loop. This record is dark and languorous, but in a threatening din sort of way. Kind of what I used to get out of listening to the still-trading-the-same-water Oval, but much more dynamic and much more interesting.
Everyone who bought Fflint stuff, and fans of Oval, Dead C, Gate and just strange electronic music in general needs to check this out!
Health, the band, are an entirely unHEALTHY, and thus utterly appealing concoction of manic rhythms, jagged guitars, yowled vocals, all wound into exploding bursts of freaked out noise drenched new wave tribalism. Chaotic, spastic, freaked out, manic, mathy, grindy. It's like the musical version of a diet rich in Pixie Sticks, Lik-M-Aid, licorice whips and Mountain Dew, and it's that imaginary diet that seemingly fuels Health's sound. What else could explain the boundless energy, the intense spazziness, the fractured heaviness, the blown out total rock action?
But as we mentioned in our review of their self-titled debut, as much as we love pretty much everything they do, we like them best when they're drone-y and synthy and drifty and hypnotic, and that is the side that seems to shine through on Disco, a collection of remixes and reinterpretations from a bunch of artists, none of which we recognize except for Crystal Castles, who shared a split with Health a while back.
At first we thought the title Disco was ironic, a pisstake, especially considering the first track. The opener, remixed by Acid Girls, doesn't do much to the original, except loop certain parts, add some noise, some bursts of electronics, none of which would have been that out of place in the original. There is definitely much more of a dance-y groove, but it's almost more New Wave-y than dance-y, and again, if you told us this was a non-remixed Health track and we hadn't heard the original, we wouldn't even blink. The second track, had us maybe reconsidering, while not disco by any stretch, it begins with tribal drums and reverbed vocals, which soon gives way to a dance-y groove, some noodly synths, but again, not all that far removed from the original, at least in our admittedly fuzzy memory. But then the next track drops, another Acid Girls remix, and everything changes. The Disco title makes way more sense. Suddenly the record is in full on modern electro disco, fuzzy synth, groovy Ed Banger style jam mode. From gloomy new wave skittery disco pop, to full on ultra distorted synth heavy Justice style dancefloor destroying jams, to skittery After Dark new wave, to minimal housey style Kompakt-ed grooves, to eighties Japanese video game style 8-bit worship, to Fischerspooner-esque Theme From Beverly Hills Cop retro, and pretty much every awesomely cheesy groovy stop in between. Pretty schizophrenic and all over the place, but somehow, all the various versions remain sort of true to the original sound. Anyone who dug the Health debut, and are not afraid to explore the dancefloor, will dig this big time. And folks who have never heard Health, but love shit like Crystal Castles, MGMT, Justice, Daft Punk, Alter Ego, Digitalism, Cut Copy and the like, this might just be your gateway drug, to things more noisy and punk rock.
While Health were once a crazy amalgamation of fractured rhythms, crashing guitars, glitched out electronics, freaky noise and retro futuristic new wave, the band always had a thing for dance music, and their weirdo noise always definitely leaned in that direction, hell this is their SECOND record called Disco, and like the first it's a collection of remixes, mostly by groups we've never heard of, but who all do amazing things to Health's already pretty amazing music. So this is NOT a new record, although there is one new song, "USA Boys", which is a slow burning synth driven groove, big beats, hazy washed out vocal harmonies, a melancholy main melody, not dance music so much as some sort of dark electronic pop, reminding us a bit of M83, all hazy and shoegazey, definitely has us hankering for more new Health. The rest of the record, though, is all remixes, only two by bands we're familiar with, Tobacco, and Crystal Castles, whom Health seem to have a connection with, as this is at least the second Crystal Castles / Health remix, and they even shared a split.
The Crystal Castles mix is a murky dreamlike drift, a soft focus sonic fog, that gradually grows more manic and abstract, wild drumming, twisted bits of electronics, voices reverbed and washed out, it manages to be propulsive and new wave, but also weary and otherwordly at the same time, has us kind of wishing the two bands would just permanently join forces! The Tobacco remix is all motorik beats and synthesizer squelch, groovy and very Ed Banger sounding, the synths thick and fuzz and blown out, wrapped around serpentine basslines and some eighties style melodies, the vocals here too are doused in reverb and rendered ghostlike, the result, like the CC mix, is simultaneously groovy and dreamlike. The rest of the mixes are pretty much just as cool, transforming the originals into all shades of twisted electronic disco pop, lots of synths, all manner of beats, from soft skitter, to pounding crunch, there's some total Kompakt style house-y pulse, some new wave shoegaze throb and shimmer, some almost OMD / Erasure style dance pop, even one track where the beats are ditched completely for something much more atmospheric and mesmerizing, long synth tones, deep swells, soft focus vox, a sort of new wave dream ballad, so good.
And if that weren't enough, there's a whole extra collection of mp3 mixes, basically an extra entire album's worth, as good as the album proper (not sure why they didn't just make it a double cd), with mixes from Nite Jewel, Clipd Beaks, and another whole gaggle of unknown (to us) remixers who work their magic.
Health just keep getting weirder and weirder, and thus better and better. This is record number three, and all the elements that made us fall in love with these guys are still present, feral jittery rhythms, sharp angular guitars, wild chaotic drumming, spaced out effects, a sort of fractured no wave new wave dancefloor destroying post punk, and here, on Get Color, they've reigned in their propensity for freakouts, and expanded their sound dramatically, whereas before, they were more about energy and sound and mood and texture, about beats and cool effects, and while there were pop songs buried in there, or at least fragments of pop songs, they were often pretty hard to separate from the chaos around them.
Get Color is indeed still plenty chaotic and frantic, but there definitely seems to be more of a focus on songs. Opener "In Health" is a sub two minute introductory blast, but even then the song opens up revealing some dreamy vocals and some subtle hooks. But "Die Slow" is a killer rhythmic psych pop dance jam, equal parts the Boredoms, Fischerspooner and Gang Gang Dance, super melodic, and in some alternate universe this would be as big as LCD Soundsystem. "Nice Girls", is all drum driven, with more ethereal vocals, burst of jagged crunch and squalls of effected percussion, the whole thing woozy and dreamy and super hypnotic. Some of the tracks get all new wave, with low slung Joy Division basslines jacked up and distorted, with angular post punk guitars, but still all wrapped around those frenetic beats, while others are just totally far out, like record closer "In Violet" a strange soundscape of looped, chopped, clipped synth tones, swirling shimmering high end streaks, more hushed wispy vocals, the rhythm, and the whole song really constructed from digital skips and strange glitches. So awesome, dance music for only those with a super abstract idea of what dance music is, for the rest of us, total head spinning headphone bliss!
The cd (not the vinyl, sorry) might just include one of 66 handmade tickets, each redeemable for some sort of prize, the grand prize is a three night trip to LA to hang with Health, but other prizes include care packages, posters, baby photos, crank calls, knitted scarfs, astrological readings, test pressings and who knows what else. A regular post punk new wave Charlie And The Chocolate Factory. Good luck!
Amazing live collaboration between Kieran Hebden of Four Tet, and (formerly) frequent collaborator, the late jazz drummer Steve Reid, who were joined by talented Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustafsson, the recording/performance taking place just a year before Reid's passing, in 2009 in the foyer of Queen Elizabeth Hall at London's Southbank Centre, as part of the Ornette Coleman curated Meltdown Festival.
As documented on this double disc set, the synergy between these three is something to behold, although the track that is worth the price of admission alone, features barely any Gustafsson (if any at all): that's the 17 minute opener "Morning Prayer", which sounds like a more kinetic propulsive Necks, dark and cyclical, droney and psychedelic, mesmerizingly textured, Hebden providing lush textures and dark melodies, over which Reid plays his heart out, subtle and minimal and abstract, yet forceful and intense, it's the sort of transcendental performance that happens rarely, and to actually capture it on tape, is incredible. And listening to it now, it's hard to imagine this being performed live. Totally hypnotic, the sort of sound you don't ever want to end, we've played this track about 20 times since this first came in, and we show no signs of stopping now. But in the interest of reviewing the record as a whole, we'll take a break from repeat listens.
The vibe throughout is pretty similar to that opener, with Hebden providing all the low end, as well as all manner of swirling effects, constantly shifting layers, melodies and strange electronic percussion, with Gustafsson adding his own powerful melodies, and we were actually expecting more skronk, but he really plays to his two collaborators, coaxing all sorts of buzzes and drones from his horn, a few of the tracks sound more traditionally jazz, but where these three really shine is where they weave a sort of droned out jazzy minimalism, mirroring that opening track, and letting Reid do his thing, and Reid's drumming here is just so amazing, you could literally strip away everything the other guys are doing and it would still be totally mesmerizing. But as a trio, these guys are powerful and emotional and dynamic and these are definitely some of the coolest jams we've heard, jazz or otherwise. A fantastic and moving swansong for Reid too, and a monument to his emotional innovative drumming and his legacy as a jazz icon. Totally recommended.
How cool is Steve Reid! While a lot of free jazz legends rest on their laurels or keep hashing out the same sounds that were once revolutionary but now just sort of sound stale, Reid is committed to staying current and pushing himself in new and different modes of expression, as evidenced here, where he is teamed up with Kieran Hebden (Four Tet) for a really nice collaboration of drums and electronics. A few lists ago you might remember we reviewed Reid's Spirit Walk in which Hebden lent some helping hands in a very minimal way. This release is much more of an equal pairing of their two worlds. Hebden creates tension and and color with his electronics as Reid so skillfully yet freely goes off on his drum kit. Their recent live show in SF was so totally captivating and full of all the right vibrations. Seeing the two of them on stage with a super sweet kind of father / son dynamic was a sight to see for sure. This seems to be the first in what we hope to be many exchange sessions between these two.
We've been big fans of the previous collaborative efforts between Kieren Hebden (Four Tet) and legendary free jazz drummer Steve Reid, but NYC demonstrates the two truly finding their own pulsating and exciting outer groove. This isn't fusion or jazz, instead it really sounds like two musical innovators reaching out into each other's orbits and succeeding in making something wholly new.
NYC was recorded right in the heart of New York City over just a couple days and both the city and the urgency shines through as these tracks play like some amazing version of Liquid Liquid performing live at the Village Vanguard. We almost want to send copies of this to some of our favorite rhythmic and percussion fueled bands like Tussle, Mi Ami, !!!, Lemonade and Trans Am, for a shot of fresh inspiration. Hot off the heels of Hebden's recent collaboration with Sunburned Hand Of The Man and a dazzling stripped down and drugged out Four Tet ep he's really sounding like he's on top of his game lately and Reid keeps proving that getting older has hardly dimmed his soul and passion as his percussive skills have never sounded more alive and full of fire. Highly recommended!
The third album in the exciting collaboration between electronic wizard Kieren Hebden (Four Tet, Fridge) and free jazz and beyond living legend drummer Steve Reid who over the years has manned the kit for everyone from Sun Ra, James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, Martha & The Vandellas and Fela Kuti. Their first two collaborations together (The Exchange Sessions) were marked with great extended pieces that perfectly blended electronics and free jazz into one seamless whole. Tongues offers a more song based album, with shorter tracks but just as much vibrancy and color, the two of them constantly bouncing sounds and ideas off of each other. These two gifted musicians from two different generations have tapped into something so exciting together. Sure to stand the test of time, Tongues is truly the work of two people dedicated to the endless search for new sounds and free expression. So good!
The first full length from Rachael Kozak, head of Zhark Internatonal, after five years and a handful of 12"s and collaborative projects. Dark, destructive breakcore in the unmistakable Praxis style. Cd forthcoming.
Mego's Florian Hecker presents a short documentation on how to out-do Oval. Erratic bass tones play against shards of digital noise.
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This is the remix album from Mego's Florian Hecker whose queasy data-crunching consists of tiny strings of ones and zeroes flashing across ultra-faint digital drones. With the exception of the rhythmic interlude by Pan Sonic's Ilpo Vainsanen, the remixers (Gescom, Lithops, Otomo Yoshihide, Jim O'Rourke, Bruce Gilbert, Zbigniew Karkowski, Francisco Lopez, Holger Hiller, Yasunao Tone, cd_slopper, and Marcus Schmickler) have emphasized the dymanics of Hecker's work with imploded exaggerations of silences punctuated by harsh digital glitch collages.
Canadian dronescaper and ambient deconstructionist Tim Hecker's most recent record, Ravedeath 1972, was, as we proclaimed in out review of that record a few lists back, probably our favorite yet, which is all the more notable for belonging to a body of work that impossibly seems to consist of nothing BUT favorites, but there it is, Hecker has tapped into a unique sound that manages to evoke feelings of loss and memory, of some otherworld, some othertime, a music both modern and experimental, but still classic and timeless, deftly casting ambient music as something so much more than simple ambience. Lush and textural, haunting and emotional, the rare sort of sounds that the listner can't help but get gloriously lost in, this latest manages yet another remarkable feat, offering a glimpse into the process Hecker goes through to create his record, the most recent in this case, and offering those 'sketches' as just that, sketches, while presenting what is essentially, to these ears at least, another fully formed Tim Hecker record, one that had it been presented as just that, we most certainly wouldn't have batted an eye. Which again speaks to Hecker's sublime mastery over sound. That these tracks are 'works in progress', not the finished product they so appear to be.
As the title suggests, the focus here is on the piano, the sound minimal and spare by Hecker's standards, trading the often think gristly walls of buzz and crumbling thrum, for something much more stately and sparse, washed out and delicate. But even so, this is not a collection of raw piano recordings, the sounds are already blurred and bleary, sun dappled and crystalline, seems impossible these could be untouched original recordings, but even with a minimal amount of processing, the tracks here have already been transformed, gauzy soft focus squalls of swirling piano, give way to haunting funereal ballads, rife with creaks and thumps and various other room sounds, the low notes stretched out into deep resonant rumbles, laced with the subtle swoop of muted backwards melodies, hazy old timey shimmer drifts on the tinkling of music box like melodies, the notes heavy with effects, the sound seeming to melt under a warm summer sun. There are what appear to be solo piano pieces, but close listening reveals all manner of subtle sonic weirdness just below the surface, in many cases, those strange subtleties taking over completely, swallowing the piano whole, while other times the notes seem to bleed into one another, blurring into dramatic swirls of sound, tense and dark and very cinematic.
Most of the pieces here are brief, all of them could have been stretched out to fill up the whole record, and we would have happily blissed out to any or all of them, but even so, Dropped Pianos does not sound fragmented, the various pieces, even in their 'sketch' form, woven into an album in its own right, culminating in the final sketch, which is probably the most fully formed proper Hecker piece, the piano, maudlin and mournful, buried in buzz, a crumbling distortion that comes in swells, those heaving washes infused with their own melody, the sound shifting dreamily from blurred muted crunch, to ethereal drift, occasionally fusing the two into something darkly divine.
Vinyl version forthcoming, maybe later this month.
THIS ALBUM FROM AQ FAVE HECKER, ON VINYL FOR THE FIRST TIME, VIA KRANKY!!! Here's what we wrote about the now out of print Alien8 cd version back in 2004:
Yet another gorgeous missive from the ether, courtesy of AQ fave Tim Hecker. Hecker, along with Philip Jeck, Christian Fennesz and a handful of others, crafts the kind of music we here at Aquarius think is absolutely perfect. Lost transmissions from another world. Dark ambience pregnant with the possibilities of wide eyed discovery and fleeting glimpses into the beyond. Fuzzy and scratchy and indistinct. Gorgeously haunting soundscapes crafted from the sounds often discarded by "more discerning" musicians, fuzz, amp buzz, distortion, record static, radio interference all lending the proceedings a foggy, dreamlike hue. This is the sound of our dreams. We watch other lives, and other people, move in slow motion, drifting through a staticky haze, while we are left to peer as if through a frosty window, at once safe and warm, but also wishing we could step through the looking glass and feel the warm ambient blur wash over us like a spring shower, or feel the shards of sound gather on our coat like snowflakes. Fuzzy melodies drift through the grey skies like ribbons loosed from their moorings and left to twist lazily in the breeze. Occasionally storm clouds gather, unleashing squalls of crumbling digital decay, obscuring the afternoon tranquility with a fine layer of dusty crackle. An absolutely stunning world of sound.
Extra sonic contributions from le Fly Pan Am, Christof Migone, David Bryant and Oren Ambarchi.
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We're starting to feel the same way about Tim Hecker as we do about Philip Jeck. We wait anxiously for the next musical offering, not wondering IF it will be amazing, just HOW amazing. And pretty much every time, it's even better than we could have imagined. Where Jeck employs customised turntables to imagine sepia toned fuzzy soundscapes, antique and blurry at the edges, Hecker, with his mysterious soundmaking methods, takes those same sonic snapshots, only later in the day, sometimes at dusk, when everything is cloaked in grey, the evening mist obscuring and blurring everything we hear and see, streetlights struggling to penetrate the gloom, and sometimes in the dead of night, thick with mystery and the unseen, clouds parting occasionally to paint the town with a light dusting of muted starlight, where every passing car or neon sign is a burst of incandescence, briefly pushing back the inky blackness, until it is all subsumed again by night's black cloak. As always, an absolutely sublime, gorgeously otherworldly collection of droning beauty! As with all Mort Aux Vaches releases, VERY LIMITED!
As commonplace as glitched electronica is these days (even rock bands are now 'glitching things up' to sound more avant garde), a handful of these abstractionists have dedicated themselves to understanding the parameters of their tools and attempting to improve upon that which has come before. For several years now, this elite has included Fennesz and Stephan Mathieu, with Ekkehard Ehlers often exhibiting glimmers of similar electronic brilliance; however, Canadian electron wrangler Tim Hecker has come into his own with an equally strong aesthetic and a series of amazing releases. Outside his microhouse moniker Jetone, Hecker has released three records to date under his own name, beginning with the exceptional Fennesz worship of "Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again" and the shellshocked obliteration of Van Halen (quite literally!) on "My Love Is Rotten To The Core", however, "Radio Amor," Hecker's third album, may be even his best yet. Through an immensely rich set of reverb and granular synthesis patches, Tim Hecker has rendered the digital blip into a blissed out field of electric drones and warm, white noise. Throughout "Radio Amor," Hecker has ripped apart clustered notes from a piano and suspended them in the ether of an electricity, and occasionally the warm buzzings of analogue distortion emerge from the rippling, digitized vibrations. Half melodies, algorithmic ping-pong tones, and hard disc skips are all bathed with a radiant luster of electrified golds and coppers. Totally gorgeous.
MPEG Download: "(They Call Me) Jimmy" [/audio/timheckertheycall.mp3]
MPEG Stream: "(They Call Me) Jimmy" [/audio/timheckertheycall.m3u]
MPEG Download: "I'm Transmitting Tonight" [/audio/timheckerimtrans.mp3]
Tim Hecker might be one of THEE most referenced artists on the aQ website. Whenever we need to describe something fuzzy and gauzy and washed out and blurred and bleary, smeared and shimmery, woozy and mesmerizingly dreamlike, we tend to always look to Hecker, whose gorgeous crumbling otherworldly soundscapes manages to transcend their constituent parts. When listening to Tim Hecker, it's practically impossible to hear samples, or instruments, or anything really, other than the amazing organic soundworld that Hecker has created, the constituent parts rendered wholly unrecognizable, instead, they are layers, or colors, or pieces of the new whole, a sound that's transformative and transcendent, evocative as always of other times, and other places, lost worlds, lost loves and forgotten memories, conjuring up many of the same emotions as folks like Leyland Kirby and Indignant Senility. But whereas those folks' sounds are distinctly old fashioned, the sound of Hecker's music is timeless. It does of course have elements of a forgotten past, in its crumbling decayed sound quality, and washed out ethereal ambience, but it also manages to be melodic, and active, and alive it its own way. It has energy, and vitality, as if some bit of glowing modern sound, was left in a corner to collect dust, and fade a bit, before being rediscovered, brushed off, only to find it's glow, while not diminished, has definitely been altered by the passage of time. Like the most magical of musics, Hecker's is hard to describe, and even harder to imagine how it was created, even if we know the instrumentation, whatever arcane sonic alchemy Hecker employs makes even that knowledge useless in trying to understand how his music works. But then, like magic, not knowing how it works is part of the joy of experiencing these sounds, it's as if they were created from the elements, conjured up from the spirit world, beamed in from another dimension, it's not knowing, or understanding, but feeling, and experiencing, and enjoying, letting the music work its magic, and transport you to whatever imaginary other world they were intended to invoke.
With every Hecker record, we seem to proclaim, 'best one yet!' and it looks like we'll have to again with Ravedeath, 1972, recorded in a church in Iceland, and with a pipe organ as its main instrument, augmented by synthesizer, piano, microphone and feedback, this is the richest and most lush Hecker record yet, not just atmospheric, but emotional and infused with a definite pathos, even moreso, than on past records.
The record opens with a super corrosive bit of blurred ambience, the sound decaying and crumbling, the melodies pulsing and undulating just below the surface, a gorgeous balance between warm melodic drift, and caustic psychedelic haze, but woven together, they create something impossibly gorgeous.
From there on out, the sound and the songs sprawl and shimmer, epic expanses of warm whirring melodies, of lush layered ever shifting textures, the organ, while not always distinctly organ like, does lend the sound a certain choral gravitas, that makes all the sounds here darkly cinematic, the score for some lost art film, all deep shadows and strange shapes, of empty streets and abandoned cities, it's almost like the sound of Super 8 film if that film had 'a sound', all the lens flares, and warm distorted flutter, the fuzzy out of focus over saturated colors, all translated into sound, a sound that slips deftly from murky and moody and muted to blown out and sun blasted, from under water woozy melodic thrum, to super crunchy distorted buzz, to music box like tinkle to epic almost liturgical majesty, the whole record, so perfectly and uniquely Tim Hecker, again the reason we refer to him so often, when describing the often futile attempts of others trying to evoke sounds this powerful and moving, fuzzy, gauzy, washed out, blurred, bleary, smeared, shimmery, woozy, mesmerizing, dreamlike, crumbling, otherworldly, and so utterly and breathtakingly gorgeous.
We dug up an old review we wrote for another Hecker record, where we managed to describe Hecker's sound about as perfectly as we'll probably ever be able to, and reading it over again now, it applies to Ravedeath as much as any of Hecker's other records:
"Imagine the most beautiful music in the world. Then with an old thrift store camera, take a super grainy snapshot of that music. Fold up the photo and place it in an envelope and mail it to an address that no longer exists. 20 years later, happen upon an old abandoned post office, and discover that letter unopened, but browned with age, remove the photo and place it in your pocket. Lose those pants on a camping trip, only to discover them the next summer, all wadded up in a corner, sprinkled with a years worth of dust and cobwebs. Wash the pants, and only afterwards discover the photo. Prop in up in the window of the cabin to dry, where it sits soaking up the sun for the whole summer. Right before you leave, grab the photo of the most beautiful music in the world and place it in your book to mark your place. Place the book back on your shelf and forget all about it. Move several times over the course of the next several years, finally unpacking a dusty old trunk filled with books. Leaf through several of them, when suddenly the most beautiful music in the world flutters to the floor, dusty and tattered, worn and nearly transparent. Finally, tear it up into tiny pieces and drop them one by one into the speaker of an antique Victrola, wind it up and what comes out will be the music of Tim Hecker."
Easily his best yet, and one of our new favorite records, and for sure, a contender for record of the year, even just a little over a month in...
Canadian soundscaper and noise sculptor Tim Hecker might be one of THEE most referenced musicians on the aQ list. Whenever we try to describe something that's gristly and pixelated, blown out and noisy, yet somehow still impossibly lovely and lilting and warm and lush, Hecker is the man we point to. And why not, record after record, Hecker performs impossible sonic alchemy, harnessing often harsh noise, and somehow transforming it into lush, layered dreaminess, weaving all manner of textures and fractured drones, warped samples and manipulated recordings, into something stunning and fantastical - including at one point a whole record using nothing but Van Halen records as source material! That in particular sounds like one of those instances where the process is more interesting than the music itself, but nothing could be further from the truth, that disc was in fact utterly and heartbreakingly gorgeous, and even with no knowledge of the music's provenance, you'd have to be dead inside to not be totally blown away.
With every record, we found ourselves more and more in awe of Hecker's ability to create these impossibly pretty dronescapes, to constantly conjure up worlds of sound that evoke truly deep emotion in the listener, a rarity in music for sure. And then even beyond that, every record is quite different. Sure some of the sounds and processes remain the same, but each album, most definitely stands alone, even after a dramatic sonic shift. That said, Virgins might be the most dramatic shift so far in Hecker's catalog, utilizing what seems to be an entirely new sonic palette, which includes live, intimate recordings of woodwinds, pianos, synthesizers and electronics, and working together with other musicians, including another aQ fave, Ben Frost. The results are dramatically different, so much so, that on multiple occasions, someone would be playing this in the store, and we'd have to go see what was playing. Which not only speaks to the uniqueness of the sound, but also to the fact that whatever it was playing, was so good we felt compelled to find out what it was. And every time, once we discovered it was Tim Hecker, we were somehow simultaneously surprised, and not really all that surprised. So after all that, what exactly does Virgins sound like? Like all great records, it's really difficult to describe, it still sounds like a Tim Hecker record, sort of, but this time around, much of the music has a modern minimalist vibe, the influence of both Terry Riley and Steve Reich loom large, especially in the opening salvo, the brief almost psychedelic sounding loopscape of "Prism", which sounds like a strange Philip Jeck / Steve Reich mash up. Repetitive and hypnotic, with subtle (and not so subtle) pitch shifts, making the whole thing woozy and slightly off kilter, but still lush and prismatic, and that sonic template set up in the first song, is elaborated in "Virginal I", which brings the piano to the fore, reminding us of Melnyk and Batagov and the Necks, all our favorite modern minimal pianists, but here, the piano is layered and looped and accretes into a seriously dizzying jumble, which is soon joined by what sounds like cello, and then the tape speed begins fluctuating, and it gets noisier and noisier, and soon, it's not that far removed from past Hecker efforts as we thought, a swirling, dense squall of sound, that manages to be both impossibly tangled and intricate, and at the same time totally mesmerizing and dreamlike.
Some tracks here, like "Radiance", definitely harken back to the Hecker sound of old, airy and ethereal, warm and lush, a dreamy bit of manipulated sound, a smeary sonic blur that's softly psychedelic and utterly mesmerising, but others, like the two part "Live Room" suite, deviate dramatically from what we're used to. The title obviously referring to the room in which the piece was recorded, the sounds wreathed in natural reverb, a haunting melody pecked out on a prepared piano, over a lush swirl of strings and synths, the sounds gristly and distorted, even some seemingly inadvertent feedback, the sound here reminiscent of Ben Frost's more harrowing sound design for sure, but again, Hecker and his cohorts manage to wrangle the disparate and often caustic sounds into something that sounds strangely composed, atmospheric, haunting, moving, emotional, it seems impossible that these sounds could be harnessed into something so lovely, but the sound ends up being truly, and impossibly lovely. A sort of fractured chamber music, that for the second part of the 'suite' slips into something much more hushed and heavenly, symphonic sounds wreathed in tape hiss and static, with seemingly no effort to remove the various non musical sounds, voices, conversations, the effect is quite intimate, and again, strangely moving.
The rest of the record unfolds in an equally unorthodox manner, slow somber piano pieces are flecked with scrapes and shuffles, the notes slightly detuned, plenty of pitch warble, and subtle sonic tweaks, while elsewhere the previous plinked piano sounds are piled atop one another, along with bleating horns and woozy synths, resulting in a warped chamber kosmische that really sounds unlike anything we've heard. The record closes with a dreamlike sequence, that begins with fluttering flutes blurred into an ethereal drone-like shimmer, before splintering into what sounds like a Steve Reich piece broadcast through a malfunctioning transmitter, accompanied by pointillist piano and wrapped in gauze-y hiss and hum, only to shed the hiss and hum, and unfurl a dreamily hypnotic sprawl of slowly cascading pulsations, and finally, one last abstract blowout, all moaning strings, metallic buzz, keening high end, buried melodies, sitar like shimmer, all gradually blurred into an abstract smear of prismatic sound. Stunning!
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In the constant search for the 'new', electronica runs the risk of dating itself with failed sampling abilities and the bandwagoning of sounds that may have been exciting at one time but lose their explosiveness after one or two listens. Drum'n'bass is one of the most guilty subgeneres of this self destruction. So it is certainly a rarity in which an album defies the laws for the half-life of electronica. Heinrich at Hart's debut is one of those anomalies. A good portion of the sounds could have been found on an early Doc Scott single or the first Panacea album, but the attention to production details and the stalking menace of the breakbeats make the album as good as it is.
This unanimous store favorite has been newly reissued on vinyl with a beautiful gatefold sleeve. Come on, who could resist that classic cover of a mysteriously sexy lizard alien in a retro space helmet? Surely not us!
Ok, anyone into Magma and/or Moogs pay attention! Pretty much anything by Heldon, the pioneering French electronic rock act from the '70s comes highly recommended by us, but Interface perfectly combines Pinhas' Frippertronics guitar obsession with (what are now) vintage synth sounds into some of the best psych-prog sci-fi jamming EVER. Interface was Heldon's sixth LP, dating from 1977, and features the latter-day Heldon trio line-up of Pinhas (guitar, various Moogs, electronics), Patrick Gauthier (later of Magma, on the Moog bass and Minimoog) and Francois Auger (drums and synthesized percussion). Tracks like "Jet Girl" and the nearly twenty minute title cut are kinda like King Crimson meets Suicide or something like that. It's at once both hectic and contemplative, filled with dynamic energy and industrialized nervous ambience. Essential!
Local early ought's all-casio group with songs about Colors, Margot Hemingway and Mysterious Disappearances. Fans of Marine Girls, Young Marble Giants and Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, take note!
Oh yes, we're always happy to discover something new from Keith Kenniff! He's the Boston based gent behind the postrocktronic gauzy gazes of Goldmund and Helios. Whenever a new customer asks for something relaxing, meditative, massage-suitable, of course we'll first say "Brian Eno", but chances are we'll then steer them in Kenniff's direction. We've just received the latter's third album (as well as a new Goldmund album titled Two Point Decimation too... yeesh, does this guy ever sleep?). It's definitely got a few new twists and takes on his usual light-touch instrumental approach. For one thing, Ayres features Kenniff utilizing his voice as another sound source -- murmuring, whispering and otherwise haunting the proceedings in dreamy, shimmer-shiver fashion. As well, the half dozen tracks seem to materialize and form slightly more solid presences than the drifting, shifting layered ambience of past releases. May be quite appealing to those who love Mum and The Album Leaf. Psst, included is a cover version of "In Heaven", the awesome Lady In The Radiator song from the soundtrack of David Lynch's cult classic Eraserhead!
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"Rave Is Back! (It's Official)" has been the DJ Scud / Ambush slogan for the past year and UK's Hellfish And Producer have followed suit with their much anticipated follow-up to 2000's "Constant Mutation". Not a whole lot has changed in the last couple of years, but these boys can still crank out the adrenaline charged fuckstep mashup gabba jams they've become known for. Plus, they plunder in some old school B-Boy jams like "Rock The Bells" and rude boy deejay toasting for fun and good measure. Just as great, if not better, as anything out on DHR or Praxis or Ambush. And unlike much in this genre, there's a healthy amount of humor and good fun prevalent, rather than the usual apocalyptic propaganda that plagues it. Full on headpummeling beatdown that never fails to piss off at least one customer every time it's played in the store...
