[ aquarius records — Electronic ]

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John "Plunderphonics" Oswald and Oval take a stab at it.

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Over a decade ago, Black Dog Productions found company with Autechre, Aphex Twin, and F.U.S.E. (the first project from Richie Hawtin) in Warp Record's "Artificial Intelligence" series. While Hawtin's work could be seen as one of the blueprints for the

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Plaid's Not For Threes album is a blissful neo-electro album of oceanic keyboards and disjointed breaks. Plaid features the talented members of the now defunct Black Dog. With two domestic-only bonus tracks, apparently.

A very splendid four-song EP from this UK IDM duo! Continuing on from last year's impressive full length Double Figure, they move further from their formerly much more playful, blissed-out sounds, weighting their delicate, melodious electronics with darker,

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Hot on the heels of Aphex Twin's "26 Mixes For Cash," the pioneering electronica duo Plaid offers their encyclopedic history of remix work dating back to 1994. Certainly none of the brilliant pisstakes, caustic re-inventions, and acid workouts found on "26 Mixes" will be found on "Parts In The Post," as Plaid have attempted to define themselves through a narrow production signature as 'leftfield'. Using multiple lego-block electronic melodies that waltz and spiral around skittered breakbeats, Plaid has crafted some of the wackier and quirkier moments in electronica. To their credit, this has worked on a number of occasions, in particular their wonderful remix of Bjork's "All Is Full Of Love," or the haunted plinky-plonk melodies of Studio Pressure's "Relics." Yet at the same time, the factory pre-set cornball jazz on the Gregory Flecknor Quintet's "Juicy Jazz Girls" or the caucasian stiffness of Kooolaking's latin house number "One Latin" don't do Plaid any favors. Without having the original to compare them to, it's quite possible that Plaid was working with flawed material to begin with. However, in the post-Aphex era when a remix can be anything, Plaid should give themselves the opportunity to do better by not painting themselves in a corner. "Parts In The Post" is not without its fine moments, although it is more for die-hard collectors of Plaid than newcomers to the group. MPEG Download: BJORK "All Is Full Of Love Remix" [/audio/plaidbjorkremix.mp3] MPEG Stream: BJORK "All Is Full Of Love Remix" [/audio/plaidbjorkremix.m3u]

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Dim those lights and sink into Plaid's deeply haunting and richly hued newest full length. Perhaps their smoothest album to date, Spokes begins with glimpses of low soulful vocals through resonant musicbox-esque chiming. Much less skittering and quirksome that previous works, but still very unmistakably Plaid. Andy Turner and Ed Hanley deftly craft tracks that are at once kinetic, lulling and enveloping... not to mention steeped with emotion. It's particularly the latter which sets this duo apart from most other electronic artists, and this their fourth album proper is certainly no exception. Lovely.

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What's up with lame musicians and bullying lawyers being such big jerks lately? First, LaMonte Young freaks out about the "Dream Syndicate" record and demands sole authorship, and now a member of Black Dog, forces Warp to change the tracks on this retrospective of Plaid (whose members were also in Black Dog), because he 'worked' on a couple of tracks. So after much dumb litigation, "Trainer" sees the light of day and features a ton of Plaid's awesome early material, including a handful of singles, alter-ego cuts, compilation tracks, and everything from the impossible to find "Mbuki Mvuki" debut album. The majority of "Trainer" was done around the same time that odd tweakers like Aphex Twin and Autechre were fucking around with their electronic gear to expand what rave culture had to say and could say. Those in the know called this sound IDM (still one of the dumbest genres tags of all time). Although Black Dog / Plaid was catagorized as such, "Trainer" is much closer to the emotive Detroit Techno of Carl Craig with little of the algorithmic mindgames that has come to dominate the Skam and Schematic branch of electronica. Instead, Plaid revels in clouds of halcyon atmospherics, Plus 8 (Richie Hawtin's old techno label) technoticism, occasional bad-ass/noir electro, and purposefully clumsy tribalisms. I had forgotten how good all of this stuff really was.

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Berlin-based Brit Janine Rostron (aka Planningtorock) blew our minds a few months back with a live show that was so witchy and out of left field that it penetrated and then shattered to bits our overworked (capital A) Art-phobe radars. We appreciated the fact her aesthetic -- elaborate head dresses, Elizabethan collars and white jeans -- was unironic and baroque, but it was her confidence and complete belief in her own weird creation that won us over. Rostron definitely has something going on - musically and visually, she camps somewhere near Klaus Nomi, Dagmar Krause and Babooshka-era Kate Bush, but she's a little dirtier, with a taunting electro edge that keeps us intrigued...and a little scared (in a good way, of course). However -- as is usually the case with over-the-top performers -- this debut cd doesn't nearly capture Planningtorock's confounding live genius. We ain't saying it's bad. It's not, it's actually a great introduction and there's even lengthy flashes - in "Changes," "I Wanna Bite Ya" and "Bolton Wanderer" especially - that hint at full-power Planningtorock. Rostron's on her way to becoming a real live Art Star in Europe (she just played the Tate Modern), but we're thinking she's probably (sigh) too weird for America. You make the call.

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Debut record from this legendary UK grime / dubstep DJ, and it's just more of that sound we just can't get enough of, dark brooding basslines, skeletal skitter, that loping instantly recognizable dubstep groove. Take "Vio-lent", which begins with some haunting cinematic strings, locked into strange loops, while the beat stutters right along side it, and some seriously ominous low end rumbles up from below. This is like horror movie grime, like a dubstep Gravediggaz. Same goes for "Shallow Grave" another creepy grimy jam, the bass a ghostly presence lurking behind the shuffling beat, peppered with disembodied voices and smashing glass. "Japan" takes the same elements but mixes in some traditional Japanese instruments for some dark and moody Eastern style dubstep. "Hocus Pocus" is super spare and sparse, the only melodic element being a looped fuzzy bass riff and sirens wailing in the distance. But the dubstep slips into grime territory with the addition of seriously grime-y gangstas Skepta and Frisco, on "Real Things", the two duel wildly, their tongue twisting flows all tangled up with the fractured dubbed out electro underneath, and then there's "Intensive Snare", which is a grime hit if there ever was one. A killer hook heavy groove, a wicked catchy chorus, and some killer vocals from Skepta, while beneath him the bass buzzes and rumbles, and the drums throb and shuffle. Fucking awesome.

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Representing the last installment in the trilogy of Plastikman records that also included Sheet One and Musik (but not the claustrophobic brilliance of Consumed), this album is minimal collection of austere bleep electronica that has mutated out of the Plus 8 school of Detroit techno.

Richie Hawtin aka Plastikman was always a big deal in techno circles, but we never did (and still don't) get the whole house music thing. So it wasn't until his last record, Consumed, when we finally understood. It helped that Hawtin had stripped his house music down to the bare essentials, and wrapped it in all sorts of murk and grime, coming up with a beautifully grim and stark chunk of minimal throb, not entirely unlike the Chain Reaction label's heroin house sound. Consumed was one of the best chill out records ever, and perfect to drift off to sleep to. And Closer pretty much takes up right where consumed left off. Clipped clinical beats, throbbing and pulsing, like a heartbeat, in a dark expanse of fuzzy ambience. The only big change this time around is the addition of vocals on a few tracks. At first, the vocals were super distracting, but after a few listens the vocals seem to fit with the whole mood of the record, dark and paranoid, they're heavily affected, run through a vocoder and distorted to sound super alien and sexless, reciting strange mantras like "I'm just a voice in your head...". It may not be as immediately classic as Consumed, but it definitely hits the same sweet spot as Chain Reaction, Basic Channel and Kompakt stuff. A historical aside: the very first acid house single "Acid Tracks" by Phuture had a b-side entitled "Your Only Friend," a cautionary tale of the perils of drug use uttered by a disembodied voice, run through a vocoder and a pitchshifter. It's a haunting, numbing track that counters the physical rush of the 808 work out and insistant drums. This began a trend within techno toward a paranoid aesthetic, and where Richie Hawtin seemed to find a historical root for Closer.

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After the early 90's incarnation as F.U.S.E. making some of the heaviest cybernetic techno stomps to come from Detroit, Richie Hawtin has continued to devolve techno along a trajectory of minimalism. The monochromatic pulsing beats appear more as the afterimage of techno than as some club floorfiller. Brilliant in its paradoxical expansive claustrophobia.

Richie Hawtin put his Plastikman in cold storage well over a decade ago following the vocoder-laced techno bleakness of his album Closer. A smattering of singles from 2003-2010 indicated that Hawtin wasn't quite ready to hang up Plastikman entirely (though he's long been active on the DJ circuit); and then in 2013, Plastikman was commissioned to reignite Plastikman as the center piece at a gala taking place at the Guggenheim. This album is the documentation of that performance, showcasing the cybernetic thump, 303-generated squelchiness, and sleek ambience that has long been the signature for Hawtin's project. The 10 year hiatus finds Hawtin picking up pretty much right where he left off - though he does eschew the vocals, which seemed to be conceptually linked to that aforementioned album. Acid threads from his trusted 303 (undoubtedly an emulator is replacing the classic Roland machine), somber synth lines, and overlapping waves of filter patterns are used spaciously around the gridded architecture of minimal techno. It's been speculated that Hawtin designed this album to work within the acoustically resonant echo chamber of the Guggenheim's unusual architecture; but empty space has long been something that Hawtin has painted his electronics with. The rhythmic patter is methodically clean and suitably precise; and if there's any criticism to be found, it's that Hawtin doesn't crank the bass whomp and crushing intensity that can come from many of his punishing DJ sets of teeth-grindingly abrasive techno trax. No matter, Ex is tantalizing album of classic techno, supposedly foreshadowing more to come. Bring it.

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Medical Records keeps the obscure reissues coming with two new releases on this week's list, this one a singles collection from a UK group called Play, which features a member of Drinking Electricity, also reissued on Medical, and recently reviewed here, and the sound of Play is not that different, a bit poppier maybe, more a sort of gloomy electro pop, spare and minimal, with deep crooned vocals, and softly swirling synths, with the occasional bit of angular guitar. We're reminded a lot of the Fixx actually, and of course New Order, Depeche Mode, Human League and the like. Our favorite tracks are the more post punk sounding jams, like "Deeper Than Blue", which is all spidery guitar and squelchy synths, but tracks like the brooding "In My Mind" (and the cool, even more twisted remix), with its ominous intro that blossoms into some seriously new wave poppiness , push all our eighties new/cold wave buttons. Red Movies gathers all the group's various singles, a compilation track and a handful of bonus tracks. The sort of sound that so many bands continue to mine these days. Folks who dig Dark Entries, should also be following Medical, and everyone who's been digging all the retro-synth action on Sacred Bones and Captured Tracks, none of those bands would exist if it weren't for bands like Play... As always, super limited, and fantastically packaged, the original cover art reproduced, and the record itself super heavy weight, and pressed on split red/blue vinyl! Cool!

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Trevor Jackson's newest offering Playgroup has gotten massive hype. I think a lot of this has to do with the laundry list of collaborators he's gathered, cos taken together, they reveal a noteworthy breadth (and yet specificity) of taste, especially since Yet such a long list of credits is also a sign of the times. In the same way that famous DJs with big record collections and even bigger egos get to bask in the limelight of music that (face it) they didn't make themselves, have you noticed there's this trend of famous producer-types gathering together their other famous friends to make records that said famous producer-type couldn't have made by himself cos he doesn't know how to actually play any instruments or write actual songs that consist of more than one or two rhythm tracks, some fancy synth noodling, and a diva on vocals. Sigh. Anyway, let's not continue to critique the guy for making a collaborative record. The point is, does Playgroup deliver? Well... it's very faux-epic '80s-dance-music sounding. The heavy "funky" beats anchor the music quite well, and will *totally* endear themselves to fans of Daft Punk and Basement Jaxx. Then again, there's some who'll say it's somewhat predictable and boring (I'm one of those people). And despite what the hype tells you, please note that there is nothing "punk" about this album, including Kathleen Hanna's vocal appearance on a single track.

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One of six records which were originally part of a multi part release from local label Time Released Sound, whose releases are initially presented as deluxe hand crafted art editions, which we carry when we can, but in the case of this series, dubbed the 'chocolate box' series, which found each record pressed onto 3" cd-r's and packaged in a mini chocolate box, every box hand assembled, and every one different, the set had a seriously hefty price tag, and sold out super quick anyway, so while we weren't able to get our hands on the deluxe versions, thankfully the records were also available as proper cds in more modest packaging. We already reviewed the first two installments on the last New Arrivals List, Taskerlands and David Newlyn, and this week, we have the other four. One of which is this one, from the oddly monikered Pleq / Spheruleus, a duo whose music sounds right at home on TRS, a mix of delicate haunting abstract folk drift, and minimal avant electronics, woven into a brooding sort of ambience, laced with swoonsome melodies, moaning strings, dark minor key melodies, all wreathed in fields of crackle and buzz, static and hiss, sort of like Rachel's remixed by Philip Jeck. There's a definite chamber music vibe for sure, but a modern minimal classical vibe as well, minus the various bits of cackle and the electronic filigree, this would be some simply haunting string music, but fused to the strange otherworldly ambience, it becomes almost like the hauntological mesmer of the Caretaker, the same sort of mysterious faded memory melodies, and old Victrola production, the strings adding a bit of timelessness, and the soft noise patina making that these timeless sounds feel like they were at least first conjured up in a very different and distant time. Imagine the funereal violin music we once carried set amidst a staticky field of Tim Hecker like shimmer, sprawling into a Godspeed like majesty, but instead of building to an explosive climax, the sounds ooze and drift, a haunting melancholia under a grey clouded sky, the soundtrack to rainswept vistas and wide open expanses, one can almost imagine sitting in a tiny cabin, perched at the end of the world, looking out into the great nothingness that seems to extend forever, this music the soundtrack to such a lonely pursuit. Lovely. LIMITED TO 150 COPIES!!

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SORRY. Electronica nursery rhymes with ample Lego beats, Fisher Price melodies, theremin trills, and Perry & Kingsley wackiness.

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SORRY. The debut single on Warp from this twee electronica outfit who had a few singles out on Wurtlizer Jukebox. Far more loungey and spacepop than "electronica."

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SORRY. Lucky for everybody these recordings have finally been issued in one package, the first 2 (of 3) excursions into some of the most fun, challenging, completely exciting & masterful recombinations of drum & bass, rap samples, and breezy synth melodies from that genius Plug (a.k.a. Luke Vibert, a.k.a. Wagonchrist). Highly recommended.

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SORRY.

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SORRY. A very pleasant remix album of the Markus Schmickler-led German electronica-with-guitars outfit known as Pluramon (who just played a great gig here in San Francisco: live guitar, drums, and laptop, super heavy and trancey stuff). This has contributions from such indie and electronica stars as Matmos, Mogwai, Atom Heart, High Llamas, Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo, SND, FX Randomiz, and Japanese noiseician Merzbow (GORGEOUS 8-minute closing track). Tons of glitchy fuzzy clicks for those of us who love those textures, and lots of lulling mid-tempo melodies for those of us who are fans of the above groups and also of Boards of Canada, Mouse on Mars (who I coulda swore was on this album until I realized it was the SND track) and ambient-era Aphex Twin. Even if you're new to electronica, this is a perfect way to hear what these groups are about -- no obvious big beats to hit you over the head, just lovely stretched out prettiness. If you're already a fan of Pluramon's neo-krautrock computerized post-rock, be aware that this sounds more like a comp than a new Pluramon disc, but it's still a nice addition to their brief (two actual albums) discography. Recommended.

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Markus Schmickler has enjoyed a long career of artistic reinventions, and his Pluramon project marks yet another with the highly acclaimed album Dreams Top Rock. Back in the early '90s, Schmickler began his musical career with a number of obscure electro-acoustic collaborations including Kontakta and Pol; but Schmickler's first major productions came with his first Pluramon record Pick Up Canyon, an album on which Schmickler worked with with Can's drummer extrordinaire Jaki Leibezeit. Outperforming much of the contemporary post-rock of the mid-90s (i.e. Tortoise, Stereolab, etc.), Pick Up Canyon brought an exceptional use of electronics to the always amazing clustered grooves of Leibezeit. Since then, Schmickler also released painterly electro-glitch collages as Wabi Sabi and an overlooked orchestral album that accurately reflected the ideas of such 20th Century avant-garde masters as Ligeti, Arvo Part, and Xenakis. Schmickler's return to his Pluramon project finds him re-investing in the sublime beauty of shoegazer pop on Dreams Top Rock. As with Pick Up Canyon which hinged upon the percussive prowess of Jaki Leibezeit, Dreams Top Rock revolves around the ego of another. This time it's the David Lynch dream-girl Julee Cruise. Yes, there's plenty of My Bloody Valentine to go around; but to these ears, Dreams Top Rock is also a pastiche of A.R. Kane's very early singles dotted with melodies lifted from the Angelo Badalamenti songbook. Cruise's breathy vocalizations and hushed etherial whispers work incredibly well with Schmickler's adept reinterpretation of the shoegazer sound. Unlike Slowdive or My Bloody Valentine, Schmickler doesn't present himself as a brilliant songwriter. His songs are certainly better than most; but he tends to overwhelm the songs with his flawless production of that narcotized guitar sound. Especially for anyone who bought the recent M83 record, Dreams Top Rock is an essential album. However, one non-music related complaint: Whose bright idea was it to put a sticker on the front of the digipak with the artist name and album title? I mean, sure, leave that info off the artwork, put a sticker on the cd case, or on the shrinkwrap. But if you decide to leave it off the artwork, then why would you put a sticker (that you can't peel off) directly on the cardboard of a digipack?! It makes no sense. GRRRR!!! ARGGHHH!!!

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SORRY. For an album that definitely IS the missing link between Krautrock and Postrock, "Pick Up Canyon" has been horribly under-rated. Combining the studio skills of Markus Schmickler and the percussive talents of Jaki Liebzeit (drummer for Can) Pluramon's sound perfectly fuses electronic technology and well executed live instrumentation.

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SORRY. Markus Schmickler's second album as Pluramon features ex-Can percussionist Jaki Leibezeit chugging away on all of the tracks for a propulsive / trance inducing album of prog-electronica. Certainly for fans of Kreidler and the recent Deutscher Funk compilation (which actually featured Pluramon).

We've been waiting a long time for this one. The follow up to Pluramon's 2003 outing Dream Top Rock, which is a classic AQ favorite at this point. These days Pluramon sound almost nothing like their earliest incarnation when Markus Scmickler was making somewhat abstract electronics with stunning results. But luckily Schmickler is one of those great musicians that changes his palette often but whose results always soar to great heights. This outing finds him exploring somewhat similar terrain as was found on Dream Top Rock, with Julee Cruise on board once again on several tracks with her blissed out and enigmatic vocals. With even more upfront and unadulterated pop in these tracks this has had us thinking lots of Mojave 3 and even the Broken Social Scene as well as My Bloody Valentine and Swervedriver. Such perfect shoegaze songs for the crisp cold days we've been having in San Francisco. The Monstrous Surplus is one of those great records that weaves itself into your subconscious with repeated listens. Minus one dud (we could have gone without the spoken vocal delivery of "Fresh Aufhebung") the album is pretty close to daydream pop perfection. We're pretty surprised that the last Pluramon release didn't make bigger waves as we think it was just as amazing as releases by folks like M83 and Mum which did get to a wider audience. In a year with a nice resurgence of shoegaze influenced records from folks like Ulrich Schnaus and Trembling Blue Stars we hope that Pluramon finally gets the wide appreciation and respect they so rightfully deserve!

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Ambient music can be a tricky proposition. At times, it can be beautiful and sublime through its ability to control an aural context (i.e. Jonathan Coleclough, Thomas Koner, Troum, etc.), yet at others, it can appear as the watered down version of some other form of music, where the strengths of that particular genre have been neutered as an homage to Brian Eno or Erik Satie. Such bland new-ageist tendencies have consistently appeared in electronica since the KLF officially fused ambient and techno with their pseudo-joke record "Chill Out" nearly a decade ago. Montreal knob twiddler Ghislain Poirier is the latest to fall into this aesthetic death trap. He has claimed allegiance to the masters of dub in King Tubby, Augustus Pablo, and the Basic Channel heroin house sound; but nothing of any substance from those influences has been translated into music. Instead, non-placed ethnic instrumentation aimlessly piddles through thin drones and an absence of anything remotely engaging. A truly boring album.

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SORRY. Pole's first album was released on the Berlin electronica label Kiff SM to immediate critical acclaim. Extending Oval's ability to control chaos, Pole manipulated the granular synthesis that made listening to Chain Reaction records more than just another techno single, within the contexts of dub schizophrenia. Just as Lee 'Scratch' Perry reprocessed tape hiss through EQ and excessive reverb, Pole reprocessed the Chain Reaction sound into dynamic skittering dirty blips and huge dubbed out thundercracks of drum kicks. Pole's first album has just been released in America in conjunction with his second album, an even more skeletal and more Jamaican sounding variant of the first, through Matador, whose editorial selection in licensing electronica has so far been exemplary!

Between 1998 and 2000, Stefan Betke released three albums as Pole, producing some of the most influential electronica of that era. Emerging from Berlin where he worked as an engineer under Robert Henke (aka Monolake), Betke proposed a fragmented post-techno aesthetic that broke from the Chain Reaction sound which had been so prominent in Berlin at that time. Essentially, he reassessed one of the major influences upon Chain Reaction, that being Lee Perry, furthering the ghost in the machine echo and tape hiss accumulation, but through a novel digital synthesis upon a handful of malfunctioning electronic modules. Here, dynamic skittering blips, pinpricks of digital errata, and a perpetual cloud of simulated vinyl static fluttered amongst sporadic yet dubbed out thundercracks of drum kicks and a constant thrumb of digi-dub basslines. When Pole's first album came out (simply designated 1), no one was doing anything close to this; even Vladislav Delay's abstracted electro-dub had yet to be formed. By his second album (just called 2), the night-time digidub structures of Pole sharpened in focus, and the fragments of post-acid bleep and his static-cling grains of sound snapped in place against the dub. Melodies flickered in the distant space well behind the throbbing bass and crackling small noises, often times sounding eerily prescient of what Kode 9 and Burial would transmogrify into dubstep nearly a decade later. His third album (yup, it's 3) had become self-aware of the impact that Pole was having upon the global electronic scene, with the downbeat rhythmic stabs and delay-impacted sounds having been more aerosolized but no less convoluted. These three records are clearly the best work that Betke has produced, and they are now back in print as a triple cd set. Oh yeah, 4 bonus tracks. We like that.

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SORRY. Stefan Betke's newest album of austere, German "pop & click" dub. Still quite beautiful but, like Oval, this release doesn't break any new ground the first two had already broken. If those weren't enough for you, pick this one up. (The biggest change is probably the cover art... This time it's all yellow and has a number 3 on it.)

In keeping true to Pole's self-referential titles, "R" is the re-issue of his first single "Raum" along with a handful of reworkings of the tracks off of that single and some remixes by Pole's associates, Burnt Friedman and Kit Clayton. While the original "Raum" tracks featured his signature style of skeletal digi-dub, constructed out of faux-PiL basslines, tinker-toy

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If memory serves us correctly, the previous Pole album (which was the eponymous 2003 release) was a complete dud, as it ventured into clunky jazz tropes that didn't meld with Pole's murky dubbed electronica. Steingarten arrives four years later; and while it's a vast improvement upon that aforementioned album, it can't be said that this is a 'return to form' necessarily. No, the days of druggy Chain Reactive soundscapes are gone for Pole. Stefan Betke (the German artist behind the Pole moniker) still sees the merit in bringing an organic ethos to digital produced electronica, and frosts his downtempo breakbeats with acoustic basslines, playful vibraphones, and fizzing psychedelic guitar noise, all of which have been sampled and framed tightly into place. If this sounds like a digitized version of early Tortoise or a more tight-laced Fridge recording, that's because it does.

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After two previous outings of cello laced electronica (including the marvellous heroin house album The Science of Breath), Polmo Polpo covers "Kiss Me Again and Again" by Arthur Russell's avant-disco-funk thing Dinosaur L back from 1981. This 22 minute track opens quite akwardly with a basic disco groove and some jittery-junk-jive guitar riff that begins like an out-of-tune Marc Ribot chicken scratch. But slowly, the guitars mellow their contortionist twisting and open into a rather attractive disco jangle. File next to LCD Soundsystem in late '70s / early '80s disco-punk worship.

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The previous outing for Polmo Polpo (aka the Toronto based musician Sandro Perri) was a collection of very hard to find 12" singles, encapsulating a sound that merged hazy organic melodies from slide guitar and cello with the minimalist techno archetypal of Chain Reaction. It was, quite simply, a gorgeous sound. Here on "Like Hearts Swelling," the rich orchestration remains while the pronounced techno rhythms settle quietly into the background or are completely avoided on most tracks. That said, the undergirdings of techno are still Perri's basis for sound organization. Compact blocks of sound denoted by synthetic bass lines and tightly looped samples repeat themselves in hypnotic phrases, following the same patterns established by Gas on the majestic "Konigsforst" album and its more playful cousin "Pop." The strength of "Like Hearts Swelling" is found in the counterpoints between these subdued structures and the expressive melodies of cello, slide guitar, glockenspeil, accordion, and ambient passages culled from these instruments. The jubilant melodies from the album's second track "Requiem For A Fox" slide up and down the guitar frets, returning to a simple descending melodic fragment that is remarkably similar to the chorus from Blondie's "Dreaming." While this is probably an unintentional appropriation, the timbres and moods of this album reflect many of the sounds proferred by likeminded canucks Godspeed! You Black Emperor and their side projects. In other words, it's beautiful.

When working in such a restrictive environment as Chain Reactive microhouse, the success and failure of a piece of music usually comes down to the basics of writing good music in generating a punchy rhythm out of Reactor and filtering ghostly remnants of melody out of synthetic / metallic atmospheres. Microhouse pioneers like Vladislav Delay have faltered when trying to get too clever in their textural programming while forgetting that the core to heroin house is dance music. But like Plastikman and Gas before him, Toronto producer Sandro Perri (aka Polmo Polpo) understands where minimalist techno has succeeded with an unrelentingly throbbing, Kompakt-monophunk rhythms and slowly filtered aerated reverberations. The murky hiss and thick white noise common to the early Chain Reaction records are present in Polmo Polpo's exceptional debut "The Science Of Breath," but have been sculpted out of heavily digitized lap steel, cello, and slide guitar. Very nicely done!

RealAudio clip: Acqua
RealAudio clip: Rottura
RealAudio clip: Riva

Richard D. James is better known as The Aphex Twin, yet his first recording for Warp Records was under his Polygon Window moniker. At the time of this recording in 1992, Warp started the legendary Artificial Intelligence series (which is the origin for the dubious genre title Intelligent Dance Music) to encapsulate the mutant techno sounds of Autechre, Black Dog, F.U.S.E., B12, and Finally, Warp has reissued "Surfing On Sinewaves" for the US (the UK pressings have still been in print, but unavailable for sale in North America due to that piece of paper with Wax Trax). Most clearly inspired by the claustrophobia of Chicago Acid House and Detroit Techno, James coaxed an arpeggiating barrage of metallic clangs and hammered rhythms out of his broken samplers and rewired drum machines. The alien melodies and warm dreamlike tonalities which dominated his epic "Selected Ambient Works Vol. 2" first found their way onto these records as ghost like afterimages surrounding the electronic rhythms. Even after nearly a decade, this album is still mindblowing. While today's contemporary discourse of the glitch / click have their clear roots in the malfuctioning sounds of computers, Richard James' early pioneering productions spoke of technological errors occuring within his broken synthesizers and Midi plug-ins. If it weren't for records like "Surfing on Sinewaves," there would be no Kid 606, Lesser, or Hrvatski.

RealAudio clip: Polygon Window
RealAudio clip: Quoth
RealAudio clip: Ut1 - Dot

Black digipak. Black disc (both sides!). No art, no text, anywhere. Just a sticker on the shrinkwrap with the name Pom Pom, a bar code, and the Kompakt logo. Apparently this is distributed by our favorite techno label Kompakt, but is actually on the mysterious Pom Pom's own imprint, who have previously released at least thirty two 12" vinyl only Pom Pom records! Where are Pom Pom from? Berlin of course. Making throbbing minimal so-called "psychedelic" techno since 2001. As their press release puts it: "Pom Pom reflects the monotone and hypnotic essence of techno." True dat. And here's their first compact disk, whose stark, minimal packaging more or less accurately describes its musical content. 14 tracks selected from those 32 eps, full of percussive pulses, hum and hiss, repetitive bass thump, Morse code-y clicks and beeps, little melodic robot riffs. Pom Pom often have a bit of poppiness to 'em, like the uptempo track #6. Other cuts are more about (Echo)spacey ambient drift from out in Dopplereffekt's orbit. Pom Pom are definitely our sort of "dance music", aligned with other faves from the Kompakt realm.

MPEG stream: track 1
MPEG stream: track 6
MPEG stream: track 7

In the great tradition of Negativland, People Like Us, Tape Beatles, Evolution Control Committee and Stock, Hausen & Walkman comes Porest (a.k.a. Mark Gergis of Mono Pause). Porest dis-assembles the world, leaving no cultural and musical stone unturned, to create a twisted, irreverant, post-folk ethnography. We visit a psycho-sexual homicidal Austrian engaged in making "fist dumplings", reciting his quaint and surreal story a la Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant". We're taken on a journey into a world where plastic sheep have been raised the same way for thousands of years, a world where Dan Fogelberg is an avant garde yodeller and where our heroes died for our syrup. Sprinkled throughout are instrumental numbers of equally dis-membered cultural origin, on par with Stock, Hausen & Walkman. Brew yourself a hot cup of Oolan tea, slam several shots of hard NyQuil and let Porest lead you on a journey through musical un-history.

MPEG stream: Fist Dumplings
MPEG stream: Pasture Pressure
MPEG stream: Happening