Extend by Milanese was hands down one of our favorite records of last year. A confusingly brilliant mashup of grime, dubstep, hip hop, big beat and jungle. Beats massive and filthy, loops and samples weird and fucked up and so goddamn perfect. Complicated and weird enough for armchair listening, but funky and groovy enough to send dancefloors into paroxysms of pleasure.�
We weren't even expecting a follow up this soon, but this ep showed up and knocked us on our asses. If anything it's even cooler and more convoluted than the full length. It is mostly remixes after all. "Mr. Good News" (a version of a track off the full length) is a loping dubstep shuffle, with wailing sirens, super blown out synth stabs, pounding rhythms, and some demonic toasting over the top. "Sight Beyond Sight (Hardvision Remix)" is some skittering buzzing jungle, all super drilled� out beats, and stuttering chopped rhythms. "Mr Bad News (Clark Remix)" is an even filthier, and slightly junglized version of the same track from Extend. "Barry Dub" might be our favorite track on the disc, a lurching mechanical dubbed out groove, with thick basslines, simple ultradistorted drums, and some seriously creepy vocals, intoning "Murder him..." among other things. "So Malleable (Cold Mix)" spends its first half sort of drifting and shimmering, but then launches into some killer raga dancehall drum and bass, with ominous strings and super clipped rhythms. "Double Face" is killer, a buzzing electro jam, but has some questionable diva like vocals and house-y synths. Then "Dead Man Walking (DJ Distance Remix)"�probably our favorite track from Extend gets the remix treatment. The differences are subtle, the backing tracks a bit more streamlined and stripped down, and the vocals wrapped in strange metallic FX. And finally, "Billy Electron (Venger Remix)" is an old school electro hip hop jam, with cool weird synth melodies, and some ultra blown out buzzing synths and some crazy monster toasting. This stuff is so awesome!
It may be an ep, and it may be mostly remixes, but we'll take all the Milanese we can get...
This is hands down our favorite new grime / dubstep / what-the-fuck big beat sort-of-dance record. It's so heavy and fucked up and groovy and weird. Some impossibly tangled up mess of Jungle and grime, hip hop and dub step, IDM and full on dub, all pulled apart and reassembled into this fucking super tripped out, big beat, Frankensteinian dancefloor destroyer.
Every track is some sort of super stripped down grimey dubbed out slab of skitter and stutter. HUGE crunchy beats stretched into lazy loping hiccupping grooves, almost like some killer jungle 12" played at 16 rpm. But with all the guts and organs yanked out leaving massive skeletal rhythmic beasts. There are all sorts of strange sound effects and random sonic flares all over the place. But judiciously applied, leaving the overall sound still spacious and spare. That instantly recognizable Star Trek warning klaxon gets chopped into weird melodies, bits of bleep and bloop, swoosh and shimmer, drift and hover between the pummeling thump and skitter.
Beneath it all, some unbelievably MASSIVE, fuzzed out super-dense low end crunch, supporting occasional disembodied ragga toasting that gets all tangled up in the crunchy grinding beats. At one point a sweet lilting female vocal drifts into the picture but is soon crushed under some black hole heavy bass fuzz and spears of digital speaker shred, all the while a killer loping beat keeping heads nodding and toes tapping. Milanese is like some DJ cast into the pit, damned to an eternity of spinning nothing but demented demonic slow motion jungle dub for all of the other cursed souls writhing spastically on blackened dancefloors all over hell. You know what they say about Hell and Satan and all the best bands and tunes and all that, well, we can only imagine the same applies to DJ's and electronic music, and if you ever needed absolute proof, Milanese rises from a black breach in the ocean floor spewing broken beats and belching black fire, all to a killer freaked out funky stuttery apocalyptic soundtrack. So recommended!
Milanese's Extend record from back in 2006 instantly became an all time aQ favorite. A total headspinning mix of old school jungle, hip hop, ragga, grime and who knows what else. A massive block rocking, dancefloor destroying, speaker shaking dancemusic freakout. We still throw that one on all the time. Then came Adapt, which was remixes, and took Extend and twisted it up and freaked it out evern MORE. And now we have Lockout, which seems like a proper new full length, although it's jam packed with remixes and guests and multiple versions, but right out of the gate, we're totally sold. Big phat buzz synth basslines, swooping space FX, and some super tweaked helium vocals, until part way through when everything shifts, the beats flip backwards, the tempo drops to half time, and a new vocalist joins the fray, his lazy flow perfectly matching the woozy buzzy lope. The second track is more of the same, a sort of supercharged junly techno, with a dash of dubstep, and some tongu twisting rapping over the top, the whole thing peppered with weird distorted tracheaotomy croaks and warped computer vox. And it just gets weirder and weirder and better and better.
Skittery hiccupping beats wrapped around creepy looped little girl voices, huge chopped jagged shards of low end, warped stumbling big beats, some twisted Tracy Morgan like flows, clipped sirens, clouds of squelch and glitch, a bunch of awesome samples and fractured melodies, a definite Sensational / Dr. Octagon vibe all over the place, as well as a gritty sheen of buzzy grime, a couple tracks dip their toes into diva / radio hip-pop, but even those jams are plenty tweaked.
Another winner for sure, and another record from Milanese that manages to go way beyond dubstep or grime or techno or hip hop or whatever other label you can come up with that barely begins to cover whatever the fuck is going on here. Awesome.
Holy shit! More incredible grimey dubstep weirdness, this time from the mysterious Milanese who we had never heard of before, but who have teamed up with the Virus Syndicate, maybe one of our favorite grime outfits ever (we raved about their full length a while back), who are the perfect match for Milanese's ultra creepy dubbed out bass-scapes. The A side features huge thick ominous washes of low end rib cage rattling bass drone, over a strangely brittle dubbed out hip hop beat, it ends up sounding like some demented electronic haunted house music. Over the top, Virus Syndicate spit some super aggressive lyrical flow, all growly and raspy.
The B side has to be one of the weirdest tracks ever, a sun baked flamenco guitar, accompanied by handclaps, underpin a confusing flow of multiple vocals, all sort of swirling and smearing and bumping into one another. There is some sort of rhyme and reason but it's so amazingly confusional, each voice sort of stumbling all over the others, really bizarre sounding. And mixed in are all sorts of weird vocal tics incorporated into the rhythms, sudden inhalations or exhalations, lip smacking, all floating around amidst bits of tinkling bells and electronic chimes. Another record that has us almost reconsidering our no dance policy!
On the last list we reviewed a 12" from Miles, better known as one half of witchy electronic weirdos Demdike Stare, we mentioned in our review of that record, that we had been trying to get a hold of the full length for ages, and finally here it is, more than fulfilling the promise of that 12". Like a more techno Demdike Stare, Miles delivers some seriously dense skittery darkness, much in keeping with a lot of recent dark dance favorites from folks like Shed, Terrence Dixon, Vatican Shadow and Silent Servant, and as we mentioned before, anyone into any of those outfits, will flip for Miles' dense driving darkness. Right from the start, the opening track a mesmerizing dubby skitter, that wreathes the beats in crumbling noise and fractured FX, the beat tribal, mesmerizing, surrounded by a swirling cloud of noise, squiggly FX and crumbling textured layers, total head trip, dance floor bliss out, the sort of deep rhythmic mesmer that almost functions better on headphones late at night than on the dencefloor, which is just fine with us.
And all of Faint Hearted is equally dark and devastating, "Irreligious" is murky and glitchy, like Pole via Andy Stott, minimal, but darkly driving, with some dense, pulsating low end, while "Status Narcissism", is like some Kompakt style jam pulled apart and reassembled as a swirling, skeletal house-y drone-dub. "Sense Data" is all serene synth drift, deep oceanic mesmer, but laced with some warped woozy, processed metallic melodies, "Rejoice" is more deep dub, but this one super abstract, a little bit muddy and washed out, like a Wolf Eyes dub, and "Archaic Thought Pattern", is all ping pong beats and woozy swoonsome strings, that explodes into some super distorted beat heavy crunch, that sounds like some bad ass MC should be dropping rhymes over the top, sorta like The Caretaker via DHR? And finally, the record finishes with "Loran Dreams", which is Miles' tweaked take on kosmische synthscapery, which pulses and swirls cosmically, but is underpinned with some deep rubbery bass pulses, and wreathed in a haze of psychedelic shimmer.
So goddamn good. Fans of Demdike Stare, Andy Stott and other weirdo electronic aQ faves, this is absolutely essential (as is the previously reviewed 12", of which we have a very few copies left)!
You might not recognize the name Miles, but fans of dark, twisted modern electronic music, might know him better as one half of Demdike Stare, or one half of Pendle Coven, or even as Suum Cuique, all of which we've raved about here on the aQ list. For whatever reason, we've been unable to get enough copies of Miles' most recent full length on Modern Love to list, but while we wait, we did manage to nab a handful of this even more recent 12" ep, which finds Miles delivering some raw, distorted, dark dark dark dance music, fans of recent aQ faves like Shed and Terrence Dixon, will definitely dig, as will folks into Vatican Shadow and Silent Servant, which is in fact closer to the sound of Unsecured. Some seriously noisy, dark, skittery techno, big distorted bears over ribcage rattling bass pulses, wreathed in a thick sonic gauze, and laced with cinematic synth swells, hazy and gristly and a little psychedelic, adding some acid-y squelch at the end of the first track. That track bleeds into some skeletal Kompakt sounding house music, gritty and grime-y, woozy and darkly tripped out, the beats seemingly sculpted from bursts of white noise static.
The flipside is much more industrial sounding, with a strange Art Of Noise vibe, very soundtracky with ominous synths, simultaneously funky and noisy, which leads into the brooding closer, all droned out ominous ambience, pulsing layered drones, that gradually mutates into something more skittery and squelchy but over a serious sprawl of sinister low end drift.
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Wow -- one of the rare AQ Unanimous Staff Favorites. Ex-members of ye olde local band Steelpole Bathtub have put together this AMAZING Milk Cult record. Sounding nothing like Steelpole whatsoever, this is an experimental melange of dance, rock, and lounge music that's so f***ing accessible and so kickass serious fun that we sell a copy almost every time we play this in the store. It features everything from throaty French singers to earth-trembling bass to random noises and disco, plus lovely wailing guitar soloes, exotica, bird calls, you name it. The recipients of a French arts grant, Milk Cult spent a month recording "traditional Corsican singers; Buddhist chanters; Algerian folk improvisors; French folkies; industrial noisicians; rockers; jazzbos; hip hop artists; spoken word artists; electronics experimenters; a thirty-piece African orchestra; a Conch player; all of whom played along with backing tracks prepared by Milk Cult but never with each other..." The entire thing is put together so well it is seamless, and we predict you will love it. Highest recommendations for a record that really shouldn't be overlooked.
When we first heard about Millie & Andrea, the duo of Miles Whittaker aka Miles, whose brilliant Faint Hearted record we raved about here a while back, and Andy Stott, whose gorgeous, ultra minimal techno we've been raving abut forever, we were expecting this collaboration to be some fusion of the two - skeletal, abstract, ambient, hauntological, ultra minimal. For the first few seconds, our guess was pretty much right on, the first track beginning with a field of reverb heavy clattery rhythm, deep bass pulses, but with something lurking just below the surface, as if the sound could take off in any direction. The sound grew more dense, more secondary rhythms surfaced, the results super hypnotic almost trancey, but still plenty spaced out and abstract... So, we were settling in for an extended occultic electro bliss out, when track two kicked in and BAM, suddenly, we're transported directly from our insular listening space, to some nineties dancefloor, the duo laying down some skittery, swirly, crunchy, clattery techno, with super distorted synth sweeps, and stuttery hiccuping beats, the vibe hovering right between old school ravery, and something more modern and freaky, some heavy IDM influences too, as well as jungle, drum and bass, garage, but the production changes everything, fantastically blown out and in the red, which gives every sound a weird psychedelic feel, like some weird sonic halo, transforming what could have been straight up dance music into something noisy and trippy and fucking awesome! The next few songs offer up variations on this way back electronic time trip, with "Temper Tantrum" getting straight up jungle, pretty sure that's a mutated 'Amen' break, but again Whittaker and Stott fuck it up big time, adding all sorts of rhythmic filigree, and part way through, some swoonsome synth swirl. "Spectral Source" is another fantastic throwback, with a stuttery vocal snippet peppered amidst synth squelch, hand claps, gristly bass buzz, and a murky pulse, all transformed by the gloriously cheesy late night chill out synths, which like much of the record, finds its niche in this weird push and pull between avant electronic experimentation, and pure, sweat soaked dancefloor groove from back in the day.
"Corrosive" begins all robotic electro draped over a background of blooping bleeping melodies and gurgling low end before exploding into full on No U-Turn style tech-step, a killer blast of distorted noisy jungle that no one makes anymore, but we still LOVE. The title track two, a churning bass heavy slab of classic jungle/drum & bass, albeit plenty fucked up, and of course midway through, they fuck it up even more, pulling it apart, and cranking up the bass, thick buzzing, undulating rumbles and whirs.
Nearing the end of the record, things seem to start drifting closer to the sounds we were expecting from Whittaker and Stott, albeit fused to the jungliness that came before. "Back Down" is all murky swirling melodies, hazy vocal harmonies blurred into black smears, churning, grinding bass, skittery rhythms, all wreathed in a dense sonic murk, sounding almost industrial, industrial via Huperdub maybe, and finally, the closer, wraps things up with a gorgeous bit of haunting ambience, swirling Basinski like loops beneath weird bits of rhythmic clatter, gristly tape hiss, static and glitch, all washed out, hazy, druggy, dreamy and divine.
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"Instead of creating space for a melody to shine, Mils have an IDM maven's infatuation with exotic textures. But unlike other glitch artists, whose work often suffers from a prevailing sense of prefabrication, Mils have found a way to enliven their creations: Even the most robotic numbers are swabbed with impressionistic dabs of color. From the trilling flutes and clarinets that introduce "Les Mecaniques du Pic" to the vibraphone and lightly plucked harp behind "Societe Duret-Mol", each composition breathes with a deep lifeforce."
Ever since we discovered M83 and their gorgeous shimmery blissed out shoegazey electronic pop, we've been desparately trying to track down more stuff on Gooom, the French label that M83 (and Cyann & Ben as well) call home. While a lot of that stuff is already out of print, we did just manage to get a few titles in enough quantity to list. This is the debut album from Mils., another Gooom mainstay. Mils. weave an exotic soundscape of soundtracky electronica/jazz, sort of like David Holmes meets DJ Shadow, with fluttering flutes, shuffling skittery percussion, subtly funky bass, occasional electronic glitchery, and weird warbly sound effects here and there. Sounds like it could be the soundtrack to some bizarre seventies soft porn / cop show or something. Propulsive and hypnotic. Just funky enough for the headz to get into, but weird and dark enough for everybody else!
Uh oh. A Bulb release. That usually equals aggravating, though sometimes inspired, silly arty noise stuff. And that's what this is. Rhode Island's Mindflayer is named after a particularily fearsome D&D monster -- which of course earns 'em points with Allan, as long as they live up to the name, which they do! Band members Time (drums, vocals) and Space (synth, backup vocals) are pseudonyms for folks better known, respectively, as Brian Chippendale (drummer extraordinaire for the amazing Lightning Bolt), and Mr. Brinkmann (of Forcefield and, uh, Mr. Brinkmann fame).
In Mindflayer these two don squid heads (at least on the cover) and get down to some feedback-filled, uber noisy dancefloor terrorism, asking the musical question, "Are You Fucked Up?" (track six). Pounding rhythmic battery, distorted electronics and vocals...it's like a malevolent, metallic Christine 23 Onna, or early Quintron maybe. Imagine listening in on a desperate, low fi 911 phone call from a defective synthesizer held hostage by drugged out industrial rock hippies...
Yep, yet another indulgent Bulb release, but a good one -- so watch out, earholes.
MPEG Download: "Head Of State On A Plate" [/audio/mindflayerhead.mp3]
MPEG Stream: "Head Of State On A Plate" [/audio/mindflayerhead.m3u]
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With every new record casiopop auteur Takako Minekawa gets miles better, her sampling and arranging techniques more sophisticated and varied. She's so clever to balance her sweetness with smarts! As this 7-song cd begins we wonder if Takako has hijacked "Peter Gunn", but soon we are soothed by the return to the light, dreamy electronic pop she is more known for. Still in full possession of sweet-sweet, breathy child vocals, playful samples and pretty melodies, she adds doses of solemnity and darkness to make for possibly her best record yet. With a guest sitar appearance by Keigo Oyamada (aka Cornelius).
Maria Minerva is the latest shining star in the Not Not Fun hypnogogic pantheon, chanelling the dreamy slow disco of Nite Jewel through the breezy post-punk tropical sounds of Brenda Ray and Translucence-era Poly Styrene. It's often been a hallmark of recent artists to use the cheesier sounds of vintage synths and drum machines to get in touch with some ironic nostalgia for the recent past, and Minerva is doing her best to ward us off with some intentionally terrible cover art and font choices. But luckily the music wins us over with its warm exuberance and its blithe but mind-warping embrace. Reverb-soaked and dreamy with a slow motion submerged romanticism that is near impossible to disentangle from its gleaming charms.
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Release number 3 from this great new New Zealand label. Just like the first two (Rosy Parlane and Parmentier, reviewed in the last AQ-List) these are all-white packages of beautiful, minimal music.
The duo known as Minit present the blueprints for an architectural space in which lumbering loops and pin-pricks of static reconstitute the flow of empty space. A subtle beauty is captured within the lugubrious drones.
Remix albums are always a big risk. Especially with Non electronic artists. Often the results can be more of a mess than anything else. We were kind of curious, cautiously so, to see how the gentle yet powerful voice and music of Mirah would fare in remixed form. Luckily the results are actually really nice. Joyride Mixes features delicate handlings of Mirah's well crafted songs by folks like Tender Forever, Microphones, Yacht, Anna Oxygen, Guy Sigsworth as well as a bunch of less familiar names. Which is actually one of the reasons this comp is so cool, instead of calling on the usual big name remixers things were kept a little intimate with friends who would more likely be familiar with the essence of her music. If you ever imagined what it might sound like if Mirah did a one-off on Morr Music with Lali Puna at her side this comes pretty close. For folks who have never encountered Mirah in the past, but hold records like Bjork's Vespertine and Feist's Let It Die in high regard, it might be wise to jump on this joyride, and longtime Mirah fans will also be aboard, windows down, heads out the window, soaking up more of Mirah's adventurous adventure sounds!
If there was one thing you could count on with Miss Kittin, it was that ample dose of Teutonic ironic levity in her electro-sass tracks. Well, sad to report, but her new album is sorely lacking in that department. Not to say that she doesn't try, but she just doesn't hit the saucy silly heights of her First Album with The Hacker. You might hear a few of her fans crying out "No fun!" but hang on a sec, the party isn't over! On the brighter side of things, she flexes her muscles a-plenty on the underlying tracks. As a result, I Com might initially disappoint in that it doesn't ooze as much obvious MK personality, however further listens prove that it does shine on other levels. Many tracks reveal an expanded scope ripe for repeat listens (and thus fortunately dodging dancefloor novelty status or worse yet that of a fading electroclasher). A highlight? The punchy brash girl-chant track "Meet Sue Be She"! Sure to win over plenty of Le Tigre fans.
Hey hot stuff! If her most recent I Com album wasn't enough Miss Kittin for ya, here's some more! It's kinda like a lil' Miss Kittin goodie bag. The party favors include four audio tracks and one video. The listenin' is plenty fun, especially the track called "Otto Von Schirach's Gods Magnetic Cereal Pamper". On the other hand, the watchin' is a lo-fi letdown. Be additionally forewarned: this disc crashed out computer repeatedly -- which is why there's no audio clips from it on our site.
Joining the international ranks of the new wave / electro revivalism are Germany's Miss Kittin & The Hacker, alongside Fisherspooner, Adult., and I Am Spoonbender. The foul-mouthed Miss Kittin fronts this duo as the Teutonic ice diva complete with
More exceptional recordings broadcast from the house of Emeralds! Mist is the collaboration between Emeralds' John Elliott and Sam Goldberg, both employing a bunch of synthesizers for this sci-fi extravaganza. Like Emeralds (and all of the other John Elliott productions for that matter), Glowing Net locates itself at the tail end of the post-krautrock explorations of progressive electronics from the early '80s that quickly devolved into new age drivel and tepid incidental music. Much of that devolution of kosmische music into garbage came at the hands of too many portentous concepts and over-reaching metaphysical agendas, and while Elliott and Goldberg are tapping into a poetry of galactic expansiveness through their electronics, they never lose sight of the simple elegance of an arpeggiated melody, open-ended allusions, or a bittersweet reflectiveness that comes from the benefit of hindsight. The album opens with a plaintive aquatic percolation that slides into a tighter, focused lazerbeam of sequences on "Sky High" that at once speaks to fellow hypnotist Oneohtrix Point Never and the soaring work of J.D. Emmanuel. "Mist Stream" acquires something similar to Wolfgang Voigt's highly innovative ambient swoosh on the Gas album Pop, soaring above a low-ratcheted arpeggiation. Very impressive stuff, that could easily be extended into a 20 minute zoner jam, but Mist has condensed this down to an economic four minute track. While this album is cut at 45 rpm, we've resisted our normal urge to spin these at 33, since Mist got everything just right at this speed. No need to fuck with genius!
Since Emeralds released their impeccable album Does It Look Like I'm Here in 2010, the trio has set a very high bar for themselves, not only for the next Emeralds record (whenever that may surface) but also for all of the individual members' various side projects. For the most part, everything John Elliott, Mark McGuire, and Steve Hauschildt have produced by themselves has not strayed far from the Emeralds aesthetic of luminous, analogue electronics that harkens back to the progressive sounds of Ash Ra Tempel, Cluster, and early Tangerine Dream, and there have been some completely sublime moments that came close to Does It Look Like I'm Here. The Imaginary Softwoods double lp set was one such album, as was the McGuire solo lp Off In The Distance, and now we have this Mist 2lp, released through John Elliott's Mego-manufactured imprint Spectrum Spools. Mist finds synth-wrangler Elliott working with fellow Cleveland native Sam Goldberg; the two had previously released a couple of lps of sparkling electronics on Arbor and Am. While those records were quite good, House is fucking great.
Out of a tightly interlocking set of synthetic percolations, the opening track "Twin Lanes" launches upward into satellite orbit with an effervescent burst of shimmering noises and one of Elliott's impeccable bass-melodies (think back to "Candyshop" on the aforementioned Emeralds album Does It Look Like I'm Here). "Mist House" is a radiant track of tonefloat purity and church organ hallowedness that eschews the early tracks' step sequencing and arpeggios, while keeping the same sparkling atmosphere. The transition from the fuzzy static laden percolations from "Dead Occasions" to the Kraftwerkian sequences of the mechanical track "Ovary Stunts" is particularly dramatic, especially given the polygon layers of sci-fi melodic wander on the latter track that gives Mist a very Oneohtrix Point Never feel. The album's finale "P.M." fills up all of side D, with prolonged passages of hypnotic arpeggiations coated with interstellar space dust and girded with a sublime motorik churning of step sequenced bass synths. House is easily the best Mist lp to date, and ranks up there amongst the many Emeralds related projects.
Mist is the Ohio-centric retro-grade electronics duo featuring John Elliott of Emeralds and Sam Goldberg, who runs the Pizza Night tape label. This is actually the third outing for Mist, as the two have mustered a couple of other cassettes, released earlier this year which disappeared before we even had the chance to grab any. Fortunately, we did manage to snag some of this LP on Amethyst Sunset, which will most likely be around for at least a little while, although it is limited to 500 copies. The Elliott / Goldberg authored electronics here don't veer too much from the Emeralds spaced-out electronics that reflect the best in the realm of late '70s / early '80s progressive electronics (e.g. the more abstracted moments from Kraftwerk and the Eno collaborations with Fripp and Cluster). It's not quite as dark or as melancholy as Emeralds and thus sounds like those sci-fi percolations that fellow knob-twiddler Oneohtrix Point Never and Pulse Emitter have rejuvinated in recent years. Certainly, these are elegant passages of arppegiating analogue electronics and heavily sequenced patterns that intertwine nicely into chiming, sparkling, bubbling zone-tripping.
Soft breezy techno pop with wispy processed vocals that gives a hearty nod to Kraftwerk. If you recall the group Antarctica whose '81:03' double cd we were digging a couple of years ago, then you've probably got a close idea of the overall atmospheric territory that The Mitgang Audio also traverse. We've recently seen them lumped under the broad categorization of 'new wave' and there certainly are the basic ingredients present - high swooshing keyboard melodies, synthesized string sounds, thick bass lines, vocoded vocals, effervescent programmed 4/4 beats - that also got the aforementioned Antarctica compared to '80s groups such as New Order. Fans of the light dance-y pop sounds of Ladytron, Air or Future Bible Heroes may also wanna give The Mitgang Audio a spin. There's a point though where the group takes a bit of a detour, and that's halfway through the album at track 5 (aptly titled "The Escape"). It's somewhat more somber and soundtrack-y than the rest of the songs - actually there was suspicion that it was a cover of Diana Ross' "Theme from Mahogany (Do You Know Where You're Going To)". Perhaps you can give 'er a listen and be the judge!
I'm sure Moby is a nice enough guy but come on, does he warrant the hype? Not really. He may bring in as many different guest vocalists as he likes, including a gospel choir, the harmonizing indie duo Azure Ray, MC Lyte, Sinead O'Connor, assorted soul divas etc, but his methods remain so formulaic: forefront the voices and behind them throw in as many predictable sounds as possible, including orchestral strings, dramatic keyboards, and really really really frickin' boring rhythm tracks. A six year old could poop out more interesting beats than Monsieur Moby. This is "electronica" dumbed down for maximum lowest common denominator appeal. Even the promising return of MC Lyte is ruined. This is the sort of unbelievably bad stuff that gets you on the cover of SPIN and the NY Times Magazine. Very disappointing!
We kinda went nuts for the recent Echospace record, The Coldest Season. So much so that we made it our record of the week. And judging by the response, most aQ customers dug it just as much as we did. Which makes sense really. A modern take on that old Chain Reaction sound we all love so much. Heroin House, or whatever you want to call it, muddy murky atmospheres wrapped around deep throbbing four on the floor pulses, smeared and blurred, the sound gloriously washed out and dreamlike. Super spaced out abstract dub, beats drifting in wide open expanses of FX and electronic glitch and shimmer. Dance music for those of us who loathe the dancefloor and instead lurk in the shadows. The rhythm is probably still gonna get you, but it's going to creep up on you slowly and wrap you in its inky black embrace, and pull you into the swirling fuzzy abyss.
Incense & Black Light is the new record from Rod Modell, one half of Echospace, and while everything we loved about the Echospace record is here in full effect, it's even noisier and buzzier and grittier, which can only mean we might even like it more�
The opening track is super dense and heavy, a swirling cloud of crumbling distortion, a bassline that almost sounds like some muted metal riff, but completely abstracted and disembodied, a rhythm buried beneath layers of grit and grime, the track peppered with jagged blasts of glitch and hiss, the whole thing looped into something, that despite all of it's harshness and density, is almost groovy.
The second track begins with some Pole like dub throb, drifting on a layer of gristly hiss, those big echoey crunches pulsing and fading into the mist, beneath it all a throbbing bassline and some muted percussion, sounding like a rougher more raw Echospace. After that the record drifts into much less noisy territory, dipping its toes into some Kompakt like minimalism, still dubby and dreamy, but a bit more skittery, and not nearly as dark and dense. After three songs of gauzy late night Kompakt style minimal techno, the record dips back into the darkness, a slowly shifting smear of pixilated digital crunch, long blurred waves of prickly buzz, all woven into a gorgeously gauzy sheet of sound, that seems to billow in some midnight breeze, laced with crackles and hiss, almost completely devoid of any rhythm. Almost.
The next two tracks crank the dub factor, dialing back the noise a bit, but keeping the effects distorted and the beats crunchy, a sort of Kraftwerk groove pulled apart into some alien dub, hovering over a sea of whirring hum and buried buzz, the melody clipped and bouncing from beat to beat before fading into the roiling ambient murk.
Finally, the last two tracks finish things off, the way they started, with some sort of damaged dub, via Tim Hecker or Christian Fennesz, the second to last a gorgeous dubby driftscape, the beats barely holding together, the sound of lapping waves another layer of hiss and buzz, the whole dub drifting into its constituent parts, so druggy and dreamy and blissed out, while the last is glimmering shimmering effulgence, sun dappled sparkles stretched into slow whirring slabs of soft fuzzy thrum, like someone took a single measure of the blissiest Orb song, and stretched it out to 5 minutes, the chords pulled apart exposing the notes within, the notes pulled apart, crumbling to pieces, just blurry shadows, all woven into some slow slippery sonic stream, gauzy, buzzy, warm and dreamlike.
If you loved that Echospace record, but wondered what it would have sounded like if it was mixed by Fennesz, or recorded by Tim Hecker, or spun in a DJ set by Philip Jeck (and who among us didn't?), then this just might be exactly what you're looking for.
What do you get when you put Modeselktor and Apparat together....Moderat! The debut collaboration between these German electronic heavyweights finds them joining forces to create some heavy duty electronic pleasures. Pulling from so many different elements of electronic music for their own special form of German techno that satisfies so nicely. There are a couple tracks with guest vocalists that we weren't digging too much, as they come off a bit forced and slick, but the majority of this record is chock full of sounds and beats for electronic heads to get down with.
Aside from the many problems which arose from the movie that accompanies this 'soundtrack', it should be noted that Metamkine - the brilliant musique concrete label from Paris - began a series called "Cinema for the Ear" about eight years ago. Unfortunately for Jerome (the man behind Metamkine), this movie did not even come close to acknowledging Metamkine and only gave namechecking references to Stockhausen and Cage.
As a compilation that documents the history of populist electronic music from the past 20 years, it hits on some important players but acts more as a canonizing agent than as a collection of 'fresh' sounds. The drum & bass representatives of Panacea, Aphrodite, and Goldie sound unimpressively dated, the one unifying problem for all of electronica with a few exceptions. Fortunately, two of those exceptions are present - Giorgio Moroder's production on the diva-disco classic Donna Summer's "I Feel Love" and "No UFOs" by Model 500, the track which spawned the Detroit sound of techno.
At best this is a mixed bag of tracks, and we certainly recommend that you check out the full albums by some of the artists present (i.e. Giorgio Moroder, Afrika Bambaataa, Model 500 / Juan Atkins, LFO, Derrick May, Panacea, Ryoji Ikeda, Coldcut, and To Rococo Rot...) and the singles from Metalheadz (cos Goldie's full length albums have been utter crap) and Aphrodite (ditto).
It's so inspiring and sadly all too rare to find someone who was making challenging music that sounded ahead of their time decades ago, and who is STILL pushing themselves to creating music with the same adventure and scope. All too often, those who were at the forefront of creative musical invention end up settling down and creating safe and boring music as the years pass. Even many AQ psych/prog/kraut favorites end up going that route. For proof just take a listen to what folks like Franco Battiato or Tangerine Dream made decades into their careers. Luckily there are some exceptions to that downward spiral, and Dieter Moebius is a perfect example of how one can continue to make weird and wonderful music years and years after they first hit the scene. From his pioneering krautrock/kosmische work with Cluster and Harmonia as well as collaborations with Brian Eno, it would be very easy and well deserved for Moebius to just rest on his laurels. But even after those trailblazing years of the '70s he continued to make great albums into the 80's and still does today. Nurton, released in 2006, is his first solo outing in over seven years and it finds him as unpredictable and pleasing as ever. The sounds he creates take twists and turns that hold your attention fast, and he's always able to take you to a special spaced-out place full of wonder, bliss and intrigue. Crazy instrumental electronica to put the youngsters in the field to shame.
Of all the various collaborations that krautrock maestro Moebius of Cluster fame has been involved in, we have to say this 1983 collaboration with Gerd Beerbohm might just be the most mind blowing of them all. Originally released on Sky, it's been out of print for ages, so we were so thrilled when we saw Bureau B was going to reissue it, as it's a record that foreshadowed so many sounds of the rhythmic underground that we would love for years to come.
The record opens with "Minimotion" a totally menacing and suspenseful track that sets the mood perfectly for the rest of the record. Like the darkest side of Goblin, or what John Carpenter would want to base the tension of an entire film around. The next two tracks "Hydrogen" and "Narkose" are stunning in how ahead of their time they sound, even now. It's like an otherworldly version of minimal techno, practically the blueprint for what the Chain Reaction crew would be creating more then a decade later. Like the sounds of a steam engine filtered through the lens of a horror movie, so mesmerizing and menacing. The record's final track is the epic 21 minute "Doppelschnitt" and really should be played as loud as possible and made as required listening for anyone making minimal techno or any sort of electronica really, as this shows you the hypnotic possibilities of this sound. No doubt folks like Villalabos, Monoton, Moritz Von Oswald, and Carl Craig got their ears on this album early on, as this record really laid out the ingredients for what would go down in Berlin and Detroit in the years to follow.
But what makes Double Cut so incredibly special is not just that it was ahead of its time, mastering a genre that hadn't even been invented yet, but that in its minimalism, they made a record that creates such a strong mood and has such a distinct overall sound. It's like being trapped in a completely distinctive outer dimension. It wouldn't surprise us if David Cronenberg was hip to this record while he was making Videodrome. It's not often you get to talk about records that completely set the stage for a whole movement of music making to come in its wake. This is one of those records, and we're so damn glad its back in the world where it belongs. A unanimous favorite for sure, as everyone here at the store is totally in love and in awe of Double Cut!
Not yet reissued on vinyl but we're told that will be coming soon, hopefully.
This is the debut full length from this US artist/soundscaper, whom we first heard via a remix on Harald Grosskopf's Synthesist/Re-Synthesist lp, and whose sound falls somewhere between the ADD short attention span plunderphonia of John Oswald, and the textured, layered, warblescapes of turntablist Philip Jeck. Two sprawling sidelong tracks, that sound like they could be part one and two of the same piece, finds Moff, employing a definite kitchen sink style of composition, that initially had us hearing some Our Love Will Destroy The World, especially in his ability to create rhythms and grooves from strange samples and layered loops, in places it gives the sound a sort of hip hop / dance music vibe, but that vibe is subtle, and sort of gets lots in Moff's wild collaged soundscapes, the structures lurching and stuttering, the sound dense and chaotic and not a little bit noisy, super psychedelic, tripped out and in its own way sort of heavy.
The sound palette, and the seamless juxtapositions, also remind us of DJ Female Convict Scorpion, only armed with a DOZEN turntables instead of just two. A constant barrage of samples and snippets, looped and layered, tripped out and kosmische at times, darkly psychedelic and almost jazzy at others, it's definitely chaos, but some impossibly controlled chaos, the whole thing strangely, and seemingly impossibly melodic, the idea of some random jazz loop, some burst of truncated rhythm and some weird little blurt of distorted crunch, would somehow come together to form some brief bit of super hooky, noisy catchiness, speaks to Moff's mastery. A dizzying, mind melting sonic overload that is pure ear candy, absolute headphone blissout, with the B side sounding almost soundtracky, but the soundtrack to some sort of wild, super lysergic drug freakout, or perhaps some super arty, experimental film all rapid cuts and flickering images, the noisiness finally abating near the end of the album, and blissing out into a dreamy droney coda. WAY recommended.
And like all Pan releases, super deluxe packaging, the record housed in fantastic silkscreened PVC jackets over printed full color sleeves, pressed on 140 gram vinyl and of course EXTREMELY LIMITED!!!
Record number two for Pan from this LA soundscaper / visual artist takes up where the last one, Commercial Mouth, left off, a dizzying sonic collage that we compared in that first review to both Campbell Kneale's Our Love Will Destroy The World and local turntablist DJ Female Convict Scorpion, and this new one definitely falls more toward the latter, a heady psychedelic soundscape of orchestral blurts, noisy, avant chaos, densely layered headphone deep listening rife with moaning brass, atonal symphonic sprawls, at times sounding like Philip Jeck spinning multiple Art Of Noise records, while an orchestra tunes up in the background, everything wreathed in clouds of alien electronics, lilting melodies, thick swells of grinding low end thrum, buried percussion, another record with impeccable sound design, reminding us of other aQ faves like Roly Porter or Ben Frost, but Jar Moff's modus operandi is way more chaotic and abstract, a Joe Meek kitchen sink approach that defines JM's maximal soundworld, one that sans headphones can be a bit overwhelming, but close listening reveals the constantly shifting layers, the collapsing textures, and blossoming melodies, distorted guitars, plinkety plonk piano, sawed strings, all smeared into swirling zephyrs of sound, coalescing into dense, deep psych-noise dronemusic, then just as quickly splintering into more abstract, avant ambience and spacious psychedelic drift.
Pressed on 140 gram vinyl, mastered by Rashad Becker, and housed in a white sleeve wrapped in a super striking yellow and black silk-screened PVC jacket, with some primitive glyph like abstract artwork.
