This one's for everybody who loved Aphex Twin's Boy / Girl ep and haven't felt the same since. The latest from Aaron Funk aka Venetian Snares is a surprisingly listenable and sweetly melodic chunk of buzzing, stuttering glitched out electronica. Gone is much of the caustic brutality and purposefully acerbic noisiness and in their place are lilting melodies, warm fuzzy synths, and playful bouncy rhythms. Don't panic though, this may be a nicer prettier Venetian Snares record, but that doesn't mean this isn't still a dense splattery chopped and diced, spastic blast of maniacal ADD electronica. Because it most definitely is. It's just so well composed and assembled that instead of just rhythms and sounds, these are actual songs, with melodies and memorable parts and hooks and everything. Definitely a testament to Funk's blossoming skills as a great musician and not just an amazing noisemaker.
The more recent Venetian Snares albums (all of which we've loved) from Canadian electronic wizard Aaron Funk have fallen muchcloser sonically to the maudlin minor key string soaked IDM sound of Boy / Girl era Aphex Twin. However, Meathole returns to the beligerent head-ache electro-shock breakcore albums that dominated his early records. This records fucking hurts; and I'm sure that Mr. Funk wants us to hurt; and it's same kind of damage that J Lesser has been known to giddily inflict upon his listeners: a non-stop pummel of drill 'n' bass rhythms, menacingly stalking basslines reminscent of Ed Rush circa 1996, scalding hot electronic blasts of noise, and post-Rotterdam 909 kicks to the head. Given that the album had been constructed under the influence of "devil worship and murder," Meathole seems custom made for the Aquarius Records infatuation with bloody-minded teeth-gnashing. Sprinkled with horror film sountrack samples downpitched for an extra-heavy creep factor, Meathole recalls much of the brilliantly ridiculous / ridiculously brilliant Digital Hardcore and Position Chrome stuff that we raved about many years ago. So good!
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New two track blast from Venetian Snares and he's gone JAZZ! Fear not though, this is still plenty weird. The A side is a lounge-y jazzy workout with stuttering Blue Note loops, horns, vibes and of course some of those VS spastic-shuffling-funky-drummer-fed-through-the-leaf-shredder beats. Side B is a smoke-y minor key torch song, all muted snares, sizzling cymbals, soulful horns, choir-like angelic vocals and the occasional kittenish growl of a mysterious chanteuse all over a moody late night mantra. Really cool.
As much as we love pretty much everything Venetian Snares has done, from wild drill and bass to damaged techno to furious breakcore and even (especially) his recent foray into dubstep with the kick ass Sabbath Dubs, like most people we were totally smitten by Rossz Csillag Allat Szuletett, Aaron Funk's musical love letter to Hungary, a gorgeous string soaked symphonic epic, dense with orchestral strings and moody melancholy arrangements, then tangled up with Funk's insane and hyperkinetic drum programming. He even learned to play the trumpet and the violin so instead of just sampling parts he could play them himself. The perfect blend of baroque majesty, and insane manic skitter, the drum programming not distracting, but somehow enhancing the emotion and intensity.
Follow up records found Funk returning to a more straight ahead (if anything Funk does could be considered straight ahead) drum and bass template, offering up more twisted and tangled post Aphex jungle, which off course we totally dug, but we couldn't heel hoping for more of that string soaked drill and bass drama like on Rossz Csillag Allat Szuletett.
So here it is, the musical sequel if you will to Rossz Csillag Allat Szuletett. Another gorgeous expansive, super dramatic world of darkness and hopelessness. Each track minor key and mournfully majestic. Not sure if this is really a soundtrack or not, but it sure plays like one, and the trademark Snares drum programming is kept to a minimum, with only 4 tracks (of 14) featuring any rhythms at all. The rest are moody instrumentals, that drift and shimmer, each a haunting mini epic, rife with pizzicato melodies, soaring emotional strings, moaning cellos, choral voices, simple orchestral percussion, harps, choirs, dark liquid pianos, completely breathtaking in scope, falling somewhere between Morricone's The Mission and Arvo Part.
And when Funk introduces his tangled rhythms, it only gets better, those tracks definitely stand out, all the more since they are brief and far between, the rhythms contributing their own tension, sometimes skittering subtly, other times pounding along sides sweeping strings. We used to think that Aphex Twin's "Girl / Boy" was the ultimate chunk of melodic drum and bass, but these tracks, and the ones on Rossz Csillag Allat Szuletett, take it to a whole 'nother level, in terms of complexity, emotional resonance, and sheer musical power.
Another twisted electronic gem from Mr. Aaron Funk, aka Venetian Snares, and much like or favorite records of his, and there have been many, My Love Is A Bulldozer, is another dizzying mashup, this one, combining his wildly tangled drill and bass and frenzied jungle, with jazzy torch songs, and haunting Scott Walker like ballads. Sounds like a weird mix, and it is, pretty jarring too, but in a really cool way. All it should take is a few minutes of opener "10th Circle Of Winnipeg", which begins with swoon some strings, then jazzy drum skitter, then throaty female vox, then some thick dub step bass warble, the drums gradually cranking up, the sounds wreathed in weird little flitting fireflies of FX, before exploding into a gloriously chaotic drum and bass freakout, all wound around that swoon some torch song opening, veering wildly back and forth between buzzing droned out skitter, to wild cascades of spastic drum programming, to dark jazziness, and back again, often all of those edges blurring and bleeding into something confusional and downright mad scientist brilliant. And heck, that's just the first song.
The rest of the record is rife with strings, and choirs, the sound classical, baroque, folk, Flamenco, in equal measure, with long passages that could be mistaken for some lost Arvo Part piece, but inevitably, the sound explodes into some classic Snares drum programming.
The male vocals, presumably Funk's, are super emotional and distinctive, dramatic and over the top, sounding a little like Scott Walker, and when wound around dizzying drum programming, it's pretty stunning.
And those vocals definitely define much of this record, those tracks sounding like some weird seventies prog-folk record re-envisioned as modern warped electronica, while other tracks (like "Dear Poet"), are epic and cinematic, and sound like they could be the score for some Game Of Thrones style epic, or some steam punk space opera, the jungle perfectly meshed with the orchestral stapes, the droning synths, the strange chorales, the strings, totally over the top, confusing, and utterly and entirely addictive. Like every Venetian Snares record, we can't stop listening to this one, and feel compelled to proclaim it the best yet, at the very least it's currently our favorite, which is saying something, considering that the Venetian Snares catalog is pretty much all favorites. Needless to say, WAY recommended.
As much as we do try to avoid judging a book by its cover, it does seem to be getting easier and easier to get an idea of what to expect from a Venetian Snares record by the cover art. Take the last disc.�Cavalcade Of Glee And Dadaist Happy Hardcore Pom Poms, the cover was a strange cybernetic blend of gears and pipes and cow parts, all in a big confusional tangle. And inside, the music reflected that (well, maybe not the cow parts), a wild snarl of buzzing drill and bass, circusy sound samples, confusional loops... Then of course there's�Rossz Csillag Allat Szuletett, with it's spare grey sky filled with silhouettes of birds in flight, very classic and mysterious and romantic, and� thus inside, the darkest VS record yet, all stately strings, and dramatic swells, held together by a framework of melodic squalls of drum and bass.�
Which brings us to Pink + Green, and to be honest, we're not sure what to expect. A wild My Little Pony world of pink skies and rainbows, pinballs raining from the sky, dayglo colored foliage, balloons and strange spaceship like buildings, but most striking of all, the ponies themselves, here blessed with extra eyeballs, skull and crossbones tattoos, leg warmers, mohawks, cigarettes, hypodermic needles, and at least one pair seems to be engaged in some sort of lewd and lascivious frolicking. And you know what? Even though it's nearly impossible (and not a little bit scary) to imagine what the aforementioned scene might actually sound like, it's not that long a stretch to imagine it sounds like this.�
Falling somewhere between old Venetian Snares, Shitmat, and a handful of other chop-it-up-and-wrap-it-all-around-insane-spastic-drum-programming audio practitioners, but VS, aka Aaron Funk, has always had a special way with the slice and dice, and the drum machine set on stun, and not much has changed, this stuff is wild and dizzyingly complex, huge fuzzed out bass lines, skittering drums EVERYWHERE, the most notable difference here, are the vocals, or more specifically the original remnants of the songs before they were all chopped up, the twee girly 'pink and green' vocals on the title track, the 'get fucked up' toasting of "Husikam Rave Dojo" complete with some almost buried rave diva wailing.�
As the record progresses it gets faster and faster, more and more chaotic, like some robotic dance party gone awry, the machinery suddenly malfunctioned, sending the poor human dancers into a frenzied dance to the death. "Husikam Rave Dojo" is a dancehall rave all fucked up and twisted and tangled. The VIP mix of the title track sounds like the programmed drums were replaced by REAL drums (and they were according to the liner notes, although that seems impossible) and the record finishes with the awesomely titled "Sporto Fucking Sellout Cocksuckerface" a slow building gabber flecked spastic drill and bass freakout with bizarre (and goofy) vocal samples, fuzzy speaker melting synths, and of course a futuristic dumpster full of garbled beats poured out all over everything. Phew...
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Venetian Snare's post-'ardcore/post drum & bass brutalism picks up where Panacea left off on "Twisted Science" with stalking breakbeat fragmentation, laser strike explosiveness, and super dark atmospheres.
We've come to expect a lot of things from Aaron Funk and his Venetian Snares. But not this. In the past Funk was the master of splattery, maniacal drum and bass, all chopped up and poundingly complex, relentless and completely brain frying. Which we obviously love, but on this here new record, everything has changed. There's still plenty of maddeningly complex drum programming, but now it's merely a framework for actual songs, gorgeous, achingly mournful and surpsrisingly melodic songs. Piano, soaring strings, delicate pizzicato melodies, horns, moaning cellos, even occasional smokey torch song vocals. Remember the Aphex Twin song "Boy/Girl", quite possibly our favorite Aphex track ever, and rightfully so, a totally catchy, immediately memorable string section, wrapped in spikey swaths of drill and bass. Well, this is basically a whole record like that, but with a decidedly more Eastern European vibe, minor key and melancholy, with entire tracks of just strings and piano, NO rhythms. It sounds a bit like Arvo Part jamming with Aphex Twin if you can imagine that. One of the highlights is track three, a cover of Rezso Seress' notorious "Hungarian Suicide Song" which ends up sounding like some lost track from Portishead or Lamb. Slinky and sexy and so so good. The whole record is just amazing, every track offers up something new, whether it's dark doleful gypsy strings, mournful minimal piano, ridiculously intricate drum programming or all three somehow perfectly melded together. Haunting, deeply emotional and totally intense.
Venetian Snares is the damaged electronica outfit of Canada's Aaron Funk, whose work has absolutely nothing in common with his last name. After his previous record of overdosed digital noise and excessive breakbeat velocity (a collaboration with Speedranch), Venetian Snares' "Songs About My Cats" is a comparatively calm (but still complex and nervous) concept record about
Two new Venetian Snares on one list. Lucky for us (and you) they're both good, and they're both quite different. "Electronica" in general has the tendency to not really progress or stray stylistically (see Aphex Twin, Squarepusher (no that jazz crap doesn't count), etc.) so it was kind of exciting to throw this VS record on and hear...singing! And weird keyboard melodies and piano!! And SONGS. I mean don't get us wrong, we LOVE Venetian Snares' hyper-spastic drill and bass workouts, but seeing as none of us spend much time on the dancefloor, it's kind of cool to hear a record that incorporates that crazy programming and those pro-tooled beats into actual melodies and songs that sort of work, well, like -songs-. A lot of the record is actually quite sedate, and melancholy, with an emphasis on being melodic and evoking moods. The skittery rhythms and wry sense of humor are still present, but everything's just a bit more subtle. Very soundtrack-y at points, some tracks are actually AMBIENT and almost beatless, but fear not, this is Venetian Snares, so you're never far from a blast of ultra complex beats or a burst of mind melting grind. Nice cover art by Trevor Brown!
Not sure what it is about Venetian Snares but even when he's doing stuff everyone else is doing, he just does it better. Nothing here is especially groundbreaking or earth shattering, but it just all sounds so fucking good! The master of ADD-plunderphonic-mash-up-big-beat-drum-and-bass splatter/crunch, VS takes everything and the kitchen sink, chops it up, and comes up with some of the best dancefloor clearers we've ever heard. The opening track is all chopped up jazz horns, that quickly devolve into a crunchy digital jungle workout. 'Hand Throw' is probably the best jungle dancehall track we've ever heard, and that's saying a lot! The best track though has to be 'Too Young', a plunderphonic masterpiece based around mutilated snippets of Motley Crue's 'Too Young To Fall In Love'!
Venetian Snares and Speedranch take a Roland 909 around the track at Rotterdam hardcore speed, adding plenty of Kid 606 / Lesser style noise assaults, possibly the result of a serious chemical dependency. These two electronic maniacs then drop in plenty of
We never thought anyone could improve on Venetian Snares' Rossz Csillag Allat Szuletett album from a few years back, an amazing blend of brain bending glitch and spastic drill and bass stutter, tangled up in soaring strings and Eastern melodies. A super emotional and cinematic slab of Arvo Part meets Aphex Twin. But then along comes a fella by the name of Bong-Ra who manages to take a handful of tracks from that record and give them a killer new twist, with a strangely jazzy makeover. Not necessarily an improvement, but definitely a whole new sound that rivals the original. This 12" features 4 tracks from Rossz Csillag Allat Szuletett, each given a jazzy Bong-Ra tweak.
The opener is a slow jazzy shuffle, with massive earth shaking low end (we're dying to hear this blasted through some huge P.A. system) with the original strings chopped into strange stuttery rhythms, resulting in something that sort of sounds like some string soaked Hitchcockian horror electronic jazz. The second track is much more drifty and ambient, swirling masses of vocals and strings, very choral, like some modern electronic take on Arvo Part. Everything cloudy and shimmery, all hovering over some simple shuffling jazzy percussion.
The B side starts off with some very James Bond sounding spy music, horns and wildly propulsive jazz drums, but all wrapped up in fuzzy, gritty synths and wild spacey effects. A slow build into a wild electronic free jazz freakout. The record finishes off with a dark late night smolder, all back alley noir, with throbbing upright bass, and simple smokey club jazz drumming, while all around drift haunting, ghostlike female vocals. So nice.
Here we have the two debut 12"s from local evil jackin' house and wormhole creating RAW AS HELL techno producer, Vereker... and they are head cracking buzzsaws both of em'.
EP 1 kicks off with the acerbic and hallucinatory side long "Rosite". A blistering modern acid track, layers of corroded noise, super blown out snare fills and white noise hi hats underpin some super twisted acid patterns, everything peaking and off kilter, some Wolf Eyes meets Phuture type of thing. Industrial strength noise house. "Disconnect" offers a little more space for the sounds to manifest, though not by much. Vereker's sound remains a mighty stack of analogue hiss and clang, rhythms grating against each other and somehow through all the chaos something pretty groovy manages to ooze through. "Falling", the last track, is probably the most dancefloor directed of the bunch, definitely meant for a pretty fucked up drug addled warehouse party rather than a pristinely sexed up nightclub. You can't hear this music before 2am... it wouldn't make sense, and that's a good thing! A pitched down and bit crushed voice intones what sounds like "I keep falling down" over a slightly more sparse and less caustic bassline, rolling and tripped out percussion phased to the max, kinda end of the night type a song where you lost yr friends and the lights are off and yr not sure how yr gonna get home type of jam. Scary stuff.
EP 2 starts off where the first one left off, with another killer side long burner, this one called "Fear Eats The Soul". An absolute seething mass of terrorizing house music. Claps that sound like they're gonna cut yr face off and a super twisted bassline bubbling under the surface, never fully breaking out. Tense and dark rave music, slowly evolving through a fog of dancefloor war! "Next" is slightly more toned down mutant groove, a jammed out feel throughout, with some seriously bent motorized drones filling out the background. "Untitled" is the final acid soaked bookend for these two PUNISHING 12"s. A simple yet effective bass line twists and turns over the machine riddims, when suddenly a beautiful forlorn, Silent Servant-esque (lo-fi Sandwellianism?) enters, emoting very darkly over the bouncing pulsations. KILLER!
Both these 12"s are on the constantly on fire as of late L.I.E.S. label run by NYC's Rob Morelli, who also put out the incredible compilation "American Noise" reviewed a couple of lists ago (which if you don't have, you need), and we only got a few copies of these sweet babies so act fast! A very impressive pair of releases from this young SF producer. Let's hope the first of many! A must have if you like yr electronic dance music murky and noisy and fucked up outta yr mind outta body high experience. TUNES!
Here we have the two debut 12"s from local evil jackin' house and wormhole creating RAW AS HELL techno producer, Vereker... and they are head cracking buzzsaws both of em'.
EP 1 kicks off with the acerbic and hallucinatory side long "Rosite". A blistering modern acid track, layers of corroded noise, super blown out snare fills and white noise hi hats underpin some super twisted acid patterns, everything peaking and off kilter, some Wolf Eyes meets Phuture type of thing. Industrial strength noise house. "Disconnect" offers a little more space for the sounds to manifest, though not by much. Vereker's sound remains a mighty stack of analogue hiss and clang, rhythms grating against each other and somehow through all the chaos something pretty groovy manages to ooze through. "Falling", the last track, is probably the most dancefloor directed of the bunch, definitely meant for a pretty fucked up drug addled warehouse party rather than a pristinely sexed up nightclub. You can't hear this music before 2am... it wouldn't make sense, and that's a good thing! A pitched down and bit crushed voice intones what sounds like "I keep falling down" over a slightly more sparse and less caustic bassline, rolling and tripped out percussion phased to the max, kinda end of the night type a song where you lost yr friends and the lights are off and yr not sure how yr gonna get home type of jam. Scary stuff.
EP 2 starts off where the first one left off, with another killer side long burner, this one called "Fear Eats The Soul". An absolute seething mass of terrorizing house music. Claps that sound like they're gonna cut yr face off and a super twisted bassline bubbling under the surface, never fully breaking out. Tense and dark rave music, slowly evolving through a fog of dancefloor war! "Next" is slightly more toned down mutant groove, a jammed out feel throughout, with some seriously bent motorized drones filling out the background. "Untitled" is the final acid soaked bookend for these two PUNISHING 12"s. A simple yet effective bass line twists and turns over the machine riddims, when suddenly a beautiful forlorn, Silent Servant-esque (lo-fi Sandwellianism?) enters, emoting very darkly over the bouncing pulsations. KILLER!
Both these 12"s are on the constantly on fire as of late L.I.E.S. label run by NYC's Rob Morelli, who also put out the incredible compilation "American Noise" reviewed a couple of lists ago (which if you don't have, you need), and we only got a few copies of these sweet babies so act fast! A very impressive pair of releases from this young SF producer. Let's hope the first of many! A must have if you like yr electronic dance music murky and noisy and fucked up outta yr mind outta body high experience. TUNES!
Are not from Vermont. Give it a listen, maybe you'll guess... they're from Cologne, Germany.
And Vermont's debut release comes to us via our fave techno/electronica imprint, Cologne's Kompakt. It's the first collaborative project from experienced producers Marcus Worgull and Danilo Plessow (Motor City Drum Ensemble). This duo has also enlisted some friends to help 'em out - among them, Can's Jaki Liebezeit, who drums on two of the cuts, along with one of Jaki's bandmates in his '80s Phantom Band. So no surprise that this has got a satisfyingly, slightly krautrock-ish vibe, shades of Cluster and Kraftwerk; these moody, melodic instrumentals all arising out of the Vermont duo's relaxed jams on vintage analog synth gear, augmented on a few of the tracks by guest guitar, violin, drums, and theremin. There are 14 varied pieces, with Teutonic names like "Ruckzug" and "Ubersprung" and "Katzenjammer". Self-descriptive names too, like "Dynamik", "Majestat", and "Macchina". Some have atmospheric, "incidental" music feel, others are more active and insidious. All are constructed from a quite pleasant palette of sounds that include sundappled electronic blippery, gently chirping melodies, headnodding beats, and whooshing soothing synth textures. As befits a release on the label that brought us the "Pop Ambient" concept, there's moments here that sound like the mellowest video game theme music you could ever imagine!
It's nice stuff, very nice. We're happily transported by this music to the mountains of an imagined idyllic Vermont (that's somehow right outside of Cologne), the temporal location of which is also oddly imprecise - could be just yesterday, or deep in the '70s.
Vinyl version (tracks spread over an lp and a 7") also includes a cd of the whole album, which is what you get when you get the cd version, obviously.
Recorded at the White Noise Bar in K�ln in 1999, this five part piece was directly inspired by Keith Jarrett's 1975 record with the same title. Evoking Jarrett's melodies, Vert layers on looped effects, drones and other assorted blippery.
Vert's new album Some Beans & An Octopus offers something new and a bit different for the Sonig label. Vert runs the stylistic gamut much in the same way that Sparks and Momus do. So chameleon-like, they easily slip from the cabaret to the carnival to the piano parlor to the seaside to the mountaintop. In the wink of an eye the music may go from the clatterous to velvety and back again. Lots of lively variety and rambunctious fun. We were particularly charmed by the clucky chicken sound in the kooky second tune "Velocity". It gave some of us the giggles. Conversely we found songs like the shimmering "October" to be dreamily perfect for porchswing stargazing. Pretty darn great!
After a handful of killer 12"s comes the debut full length from Vessel, aka 22 year old producer Sebastian Gainsborough, who sounds right at home on Tri Angle, especially after the recent release of the new record from Holy Other. But where the Holy Other record found HO taking a stab at mainstream radio pop (and failing spectacularly), creating a warped chunk of radio-proof, avant, slo-mo soul pop weirdness, Vessel uses a similar sonic palette, but to create something much more tranquil, spaced out and psychedelic. The dub vibe is huge, at times the sound reminding us of a more reverby, dub heavy Burial. "Stillborn Dub" delivers a breathy, fragmented vocal line, over a spacious sprawl of blurry sonic haze, of skeletal rhythms, of murky bass pulsations, all held together by that distinctive upstroke melody. But then "Images Of Bodies" ditches all that dubbiness for some super minimal sci-fi house music, peppered with all sorts of weird FX, some fuzzy bass warble, the sound somehow equal parts techno and some mutant strain of futuristic electro, but whatever it is, it works. Woozy and warped, total tripped out late night avant techno mesmer. The sound continues to shift throughout, making Vessel a tough one to pin down, some tracks fusing hazy Pop Ambient shimmer to dramatic Portishead like downtempo moodiness, others taking murky minimalism and burying hip hop beats and breathy processed vox, still others channeling classic nineties IDM into something bloopy and playful, but always with a certain sinister undercurrent. And throughout the record, the oddest sounds will pop up, instantly changing the feel of the song, a groovy throbbing synth here, a warped house music pulse there, hazy eighties keyboards, wild tangles of electronic melody, distorted buzz, bursts of glitch and squelch, the sound occasionally dense and propulsive, driving and hypnotic, but more often then not, much darker hued, more laid back and darkly druggy, and be sure to stick around for the brief 2+ minute closer, which might be our favorite jam here, a dubbed out hazy distorted shimmery creep, that sounds like Vessel remixed by the Caretaker!
The first full length from Vessel, aka producer Sebastian Gainsborough, 2012's Order Of Noise, was a perfect fit for the Tri Angle label, sounding very much like labelmates oOoOO, Balam Acab, Holy Other, etc. All warped and woozy, fractured slo-mo soul, dark, slithery, downtempo creeps that sounded like Portishead 12"s melted down, and then repressed into something much more alien, and otherworldly.
Punish, Honey is something else altogether, though. Gone are the pitch shifted vocals, the spare dubbed out minimal moodiness, and in their place, something much more bombastic and percussive, dense and collaged, and WAY more experimental. While that first record channeled the soulful murk of Burial, the sound here is almost more post industrial, still soulful for sure, but with hints of Throbbing Gristle, This Heat, and other much more avant influences, that you might not expect to hear woven into what is ostensibly dance music. That said, the music here is truly not designed for the dancefloor. Instead, in some ways at least, it hews closer to the sound design of folks like Ben Frost and Roly Porter. In fact, imagine some sort of Portishead / Ben Frost mash-up and you'd be getting close. From the opening intro, you know something has changed, what sounds like a solo performance on snare drum, in a big empty room, that blown out snare soon joined by processed recordings of what sounds like jackhammers, the result is some super abstract 20th century sounding weirdness, replete with skittery, stuttery rhythms, and keening siren like tones. It's not all that far out, but a lot of it comes close.
"Red Sex" sounds like Latin Playboys if the group was made up of robots, Marc Ribot like guitars wrapped around metallic buzz, and a churning looped beat, the vibe hazy and nocturnal, you can almost imagine someone like Tom Waits hearing a track like this and then recruiting Gainsborough to work on his new record. It's the moody, murky "Drowned In Water And Light" that really seals the deal, a cloud of swirling tones, gives way to a lumbering big beat, those tones bleeding and blurring into sinister shimmers, the sound almost like the score for some silent movie, wound around a lurching plod and pound, the atmosphere in constant motion, buzzing and thrumming, rich and lustrous and seriously haunting. From there on out Gainsborough continues to push the envelope, his mutant electronica harrowing at times, wistfully obtuse at others, a few tracks, like "Anima" sound almost like Amps For Christ, a sort of noise-folk psychedelia subtly infused into the otherwise mesmeric churn, or tracks like "Black Leaves And Broken Branches", that sounds like some lost Jewelled Antler campfire jam, all wheezing chords, muted percussion, lazy, languorous melodies, clouds of cymbal shimmer, distant horn bleats, albeit pocked with the occasional industrial burst. The final track is the 'danciest' of the bunch, but even there, the sound is noisy, and distorted, and dizzying, clattery and psychedelic, and it's preceded by two tracks of dreamy soft noise skitter and blurred Caretaker like ambient drift. Love it!!!
We weren't at all sure what to expect from this, the debut from a punk rocker turned Madlib acolyte, with a handful of lo-tech gear, a drum machine and a sampler, although he apparently has a live band, but just check out that first sample below, it's like Portishead crossed with This Heat, but with a weird sort of post punk vibe, the lurching looped rhythm, the woozy groove, those echo drenched laid back vox, everything hazy and blurry, the song peppered with some mysterious industrial clatter and hiss, as if this was some sort of surreptitious jam happening at some subterranean construction site, it's pretty insanely appealing, and although influenced by and rooted in hip hop, the vibe is way more punk. The rest of the tracks too, it's as if he was trying to make a punk record but decided to do it usually just a sampler and a drum machine, which is pretty much what he did, but the results are pretty bad ass, the songs simple, most with just two parts, slipping from verse to chorus to verse again, but it gives the tracks a sort of minimal repetitive trancelike quality, a sort of Velvet Underground feel, albeit rendered in crunchy distorted guitars and looped breakbeats. Some of the tracks even sound all cold wave-y, with deep dramatic vox over pounding Teutonic beats and wrapped in clouds of noise and skree. "Crash Course" almost sounds like it could be a 7" on Wierd or Sacred Bones, or even some unearthed eighties dancepunk jam reissued on Dark Entries.
Killer stuff, really hope there's a full length on the horizon, cuz we're spinning this ep to death!
Cloud Seed marks the first appearance of Vex'd on the aQ list which makes no sense at all. Of all the outsider dubstep going on, of which there's more than you might think, but still not nearly enough, Vex'd might just be the coolest, and most compelling, at least amongst folks IN the actual dubstep scene. The core elements are still present, THAT skittery beat, the fuzzy warbly basslines, but beyond that, Vex'd drags the dubstep tropes through the sonic mud, and comes out the other side with something totally original and twisted, and with only a passing resemblance to dubstep proper.
From spare and skeletal do dense and dark, Vex'd's sound manages to be simultaneously lush and rough and raw, the recordings themselves as much a part of the sound, if anything, deconstructing the sound into weird ambience, and dark textural soundscapes, occasionally coalescing into something more dubsteppy.
The opener is super dubbed out, ultra minimal, lots of space, tons of reverb, with Warrior Queen's toasted vox laid over streaks of fuzz bass, loping clanky rhythm, almost like some sort of double dutch jam, but slowed waaaaay down.
But that's followed by some abstract experimental ambience. Hazy and washed out, very Tim Hecker-ish, but laced with some strange grinding skitter, lush string swells, and clipped sampled crunch.
"Heart Space" is maybe the most commercial of the bunch, like a dubstep Portishead, with some sultry female vocals, some awesome warbly bass, all tangled up into a druggy psychedelic dubby drift. But it's all a stumbling druggy descent into madness after that, from the ominous trancelike skitter of "Out of the Hills" to the blurred softly glitchy dreamdrone shimmer of "Out of the Hills", to the super grime-y blown out bass churn of "Slug Trawl Depths", to the warped cosmic hip hop bass heavy dub of "Disposition" with some awesome lugubrious vocals, dipping into Kode9 territory.
The comes the remixes, which are just as good as any of the tracks proper, Plaid's "Bar Kimura" is all swoonsome and swirly and skittery, with a subtle bit of dubstep bass, bleary eyed and sun dappled, with weird crooned vox, "Killing Floor" is the heaviest dubstep jam here, the bass fucking fierce and sharp, the beats jagged, about as hard as it gets, the Distance track "Fallen" gets reworked into something a bit more spaced out, with some serious bass warble, and some fragmented melody. Then there are two sort of classical mixes, one "Suite For Piano & Electronics", is all deeeeeeep drones, rumbling thrum, peppered with streaks of high end, fragments of melody, but overall dark and grim and intense, while Prokofiev's "String Quartet No.2" gets reworked into a stuttery string-ed lurch, super strange and very Timbaland-like, you can almost imagine some weirdo rapping over the top, with lots of grinding strings, and stop / starts.
Finally the record finishes off with two thick, almost doomy dubby dirges. The first layers a simple beat over a thick blackened rumble, an ominous minor key melody, deep thick swells, like a dubby Jesu almost, and then comes record closer "Nails", a creepy, thick swath of industrial crunch and buzz, big pounding beats, cinematic melodies, the bass thick and intense, finishing off with a killer collaged burst of sliced and diced death metal all tangled up with grinding pummeling industrial dub.
So awesome. And while this is definitely the best Vex'd record yet, and well deserving of Record Of The Week honors, this also maybe makes up for somehow not listing any of the other awesome Vex'd records. Another record to add to your aQ dancefloor destroying DJ kit!
This sounds like electronic music made by someone who spent way too much of their life working in a video rental shop. And in fact, that just might be the case. Released on the UK label Skam in one of those solid black jewel cases they like to use, this 19 minute disc is a fairly entertaining ADD episode of sample-based electronica, a collage of music and sounds apparently almost exclusively sourced from VHS tapes of cheesy '80s movies, we're guessing many of them the straight-to-video variety. It's a jagged, jaunty cavalcade of chopped-up sounds, chaotic and glitchy, funky too, almost like a more lo-fi Justice, VHS Head splicing together synth themes, electro-beats, and all too serious sounding voiceovers (the first words you hear are "Matthew Modine"). The five tracks here aren't exactly fully realized "songs" (this ain't DJ Shadow digging through the old tapes at your local video emporium), it's more kinetically random sounding than that, but definitely fun stuff, and even comes with a "video club" membership card. Remember, be kind, rewind.
Via Sinistrae's album The Tower looms like a foreboding industrial thunderhead, conjuring apocalyptic visions of claustrophobic chambers and clammy chemically battered flesh. Well, at least it did for this listener! Heavily processed voices, sand-blown rhythmic passages and noise bursts lurk and lunge out of these thickly shadowed soundscapes draped in murky grey and brown hues. Recorded live.
French prog from the seventies can move us in just the right ways, especially if it hits that sweet spot between Kosmiche new age and sublime Euro-jazz, yet still has that individually eccentric feel that you only get from the French. Patrick Vian's sole 1976 lp Bruits et Temps Analogues, famously included on the Nurse With Wound list, is just such a record. An amalgam of Michael Rother sky gliding electronic music and a mellower take on the "Superficial Music" of Bernard Szajner, Vian packs a lot of punch into his compositions, propelled forward by the hypnotic counterpoint of sunny guitar lines, analog Moog washes, flutes and all kinds of dazzling rhythmic instrumentation, such as kinetic jazz drumming, and deep vibraphones, the latter thanks to the help of Mino Cinelu (who had played with the likes of Gong, Weather Report and Miles Davis). There's also an exotica quality at play here especially on the track, "Orenock" which feels like we're on safari on some strange desolate planet, as well as some avant-garde tendencies, such as using tape manipulations of recordings of American sporting events on the musique concrete piece, "Tricentennial Drag". Vian began his musical career in the legendary French prog /free jazz band Red Noise, but the vibe on Bruits et Temps Analogues is way more serene and groovy. It lives up to its awesome cover painting. Originally released on the Egg / Barclay label, it's about time this stellar album got reissued. Thanks Staubgold! Highest Recommendation!!
A surprisingly pleasant meeting of minds (and nimble fingers): legendary British steel guitar player BJ Cole and knobtwiddling Luke Vibert (Plug). The cool thing is that BJ Cole is the one who approached Vibert about collaborating. This is one of those records that's so appealing we sell multiple copies every time we play it. David Toop, the music writer who brought the two musicians together, enthuses: "Almost everything I like is on here: swinging big bass, melancholy honky tonk romanticism, Hawaiian music, R&B, stragne harmonies, psychedelic Indian music, Yma Sumac style vocals, electricity, acid, moody piano loops, scorching fuzz lines, sliding strings, indefinable noise and slamming big band brass. It makes me laugh for being so brazenly cheesy but at the same time it's so in-the-pocket, as musicians used to say, so inventive, so uncontrived and so up that I play it over and over."
Victrola was an Italo-disco project that released just one single in 1983 although they began performing as a standard quartet back in 1979, only to slim down to just a duo, electronics and guitar. This one single hedges more toward the darker regions of Italo-disco with minor-key basslines girding metronomic hi-hat and mechanoid disco rhythms. The title track graces us with some catchy, ice-synth melodicism and monotone vocal melancholy that's not too far from the likes of Section 25 or Neon Judgement; and this was actually featured on the recent Mutazione compendium of Italian post-punk, new wave, and early Italo-disco. The B side "Game Of Despair" is an even darker affair with skeletal guitar chords chiming with the elegiac electronics and slow-motion rhythmic tranced-out programming. Both tracks are well over 8 minutes long, and it seems that this is all that Victrola were ever to record. That's a shame as these are stellar tracks for the black-eyeliner set! As always, Dark Entries has spared no expense with the production value of the vinyl, with a top-shelf remastering job by George Horn and an exact reproduction of the original artwork.
Also known as Televasquez and the proprietor of the East Bay electronica label Incomplet, Vid offers his debut album on Phthalo of quiet stirrings for dubbed-out electronics and cybernetic timestreched drones over slow motion drum machines. Certainly fits in
You know we like repetition here at Aquarius. We like repetition. We like it. Repetition. Whether it's the motorik pulses of Neu! and Circle, or the minimalist throb of Steve Reich and The Necks, or the crackling loops of Philip Jeck and Thomas Brinkmann, or the headnodding riffs of Om and Les Rallizes Denudes, or the blurring buzz of Wigrid and Wold... we like it! Keep it goin' and we'll keep listening. Well of course one of the many musical forms that makes good use of repetition is dance music, and although sometimes we give the impression that techno and house music "isn't our thing" that's definitely not true about all techno music. Not when it's really, really about the mesmeric repetition, and in an interesting way, like the clicks and cuts of Ryoji Ikeda or the "heroin house" of Fluxion. Or the whole Kompakt catalog of pop ambient drone and beats.
Or this new disc by critical darling Ricardo Villalobos! Which is probably getting a lot of attention because of the sheer length of the tracks on it -- there's two of 'em, clocking in at more than a half-an-hour each! The title cut, "Fizheuer Zieheuer" is truly hypnotic, based on endless, slightly altered iterations of the same happy little horn riff (sampled from a Balkan brass band?), expertly joined to echoing four-on-the-floor techno beats, slowly morphing and shifting over time -- 37 minutes! Deceptively simple, but brilliantly crafted. And yes, totally, totally mesmerizing. Allan turned on the "visualizer" function on his iTunes while playing this and we all got totally tranced-out watching the flashing lights...
This album is maybe really sort of an extreme maxi-single, as the 35 and a half minute second track "Fizbeast" is a stripped-down (minus the horns) recap of the first track -- yay, more repetition! But you might also just hit play on track one again, 'cause you're gonna want to hear that infectious Balkan horn part again and again and again. Recommended, recommended, recommended...
FYI this cd is intentionally packaged by Playhouse without a tray card in the jewel case. Either 'cause it's sort-of a single, or 'cause they feel that electronic music is so modern it doesn't need a back cover, we don't know. Just mentioning this fact so that if you mailorder it, you won't think there's something wrong with your copy...
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.
Ok, this one should be easy. Ricardo Villalobos is the minimal techno whizz from Chile (based now in Berlin) who made one of our very favorite techno albums ever, last year's very-extended-play "ep" Fizheuer Zieheuer, which has to be of the most hypnotically repetitive electronica artifacts we know of. His more recent Fabric 36 set was also a crowd pleaser here at AQ.
Meanwhile, the French band Magma is of course pretty much our number one '70s progressive rock obsession. It's practically a spiritual thing we've got about them. And like Villalobos, they're no strangers to hypnotic rhythmic pulsations, in their own proggy purview.
So, as soon as we found out that Villalobos had released a white label 12" based around sampled music by Magma, we wanted to hear it. We NEEDED to hear it. And when we did, we were quite pleased. Villalobos merges with Magma almost seamlessly, taking and looping a snippet of the Magma album Baba Yaga La Sorciere (the one featuring a version of Magma's classic Mekanik Destruktiw Kommandoh sung by a children's choir, we should note, which makes this even more awesome... and that's why it's called Enfants), then adding a techno beat to it. The minimalist melodic piano and the kids' Kobaian chant and the high-hat ticking go together elegantly, enchantingly, endlessly... it's about 17 minutes long! Simple, but effective. And very much a tribute to Magma, Villalobos giving credit where credit is due, just having some fanboy fun as a producer here, making his (and our) kind of techno/Magma hybrid. There's another 10 minutes on the flip, Villalobos focussing on percussion elements rather than the "chant", which we imagine that DJs could do some interesting things with.
We've been wanting to list this 12" for a while, and finally got enough copies in stock to do so thanks to Villalobos doing a second pressing (it's on his own label). Recommended!
Up until now, London super-club Fabric has exclusively been releasing mix CDs from various electronic artists. Chilean-born, Berlin-based minimal techno darling Ricardo Villalobos is changing that by using Fabric 36 as a venue for an entire LP worth of new material. Anyone who has followed his work from somewhere around the acclaimed Alcachofa full-length through last year's brilliant Fizheuer Zieheuer has no doubt recognized an ever-increasing level of abstraction. Well, this release is no different. In fact, the album almost completely abandons traditional song structure in favor of an approach that takes slivers of audial minutiae and effects and processes them into a crescendo of balearic beats and breakdowns. The pieces develop slowly and organically with tightly wound percussive elements layered masterfully upon one another. And, if nothing else, this disc shows the further evolution of an artist destined to be remembered as one of the more cerebral -- yet engaging -- artists in his genre. Definitely recommended for fans of minimal techno or to a lesser extent Latin rhythm!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
We're still obsessing over Villalobos and Loderbauer's recent double disc of super electronic minimalism, all sourced from various ECM recordings (a recent Record Of The Week), we play it constantly like crazy, we weren't sure what to expect from this new 12", but it features two new tracks from the duo, this time incorporating the music of an African group called Tshetsha Boys, and for the first few minutes, we really didn't hear anything, just some super cool, sleek, ultra minimal and skeletal techno, pulsing and hypnotic, but as the track progressed, little melodies seemed to surface, snippets of voices, bits of percussion, looped, and truncated, and blurred a bit, a little effects, a bit dubbed out, but the song began to sound subtly African, the melodies lilting and slowly adding warmth to the otherwise cool electronic shuffle.
The flipside is a whole different story, BIG beats, very housey, at first we weren't hearing any of the Tshetsha Boys, until we realized the main melody was in fact the borrowed element, Villalobos and Loderbauer deftly weaving that looped cyclical element into that pulsing pounding big beat.
Cool stuff.
We've long been fans of minimal techno maven Ricardo Villalobos, his records spare and skeletal, rhythmic and repetitive, the sort of electronic music we find utterly mesmerizing and totally irresistible. In addition to that, Villalobos does not shy away from strange sonic experiments, and is thus no stranger to odd samples, considering he made a whole record out of sounds borrowed from French prog legends Magma, so this new record really shouldn't have been that much of a surprise, nor should we have been surprised by just HOW great it turned out, but it was, and we were, which should speak to just how incredible this strange sonic experiment truly is. Villalobos teamed up with Max Loderbauer and created this sprawling double disc which is essentially a minimal techno mash up of modern classical and European jazz, with all the sounds culled from various releases on the legendary ECM label, which include, most excitingly for us, Arvo Part, but also loads of ECM stalwarts like Bennie Maupin, Paul Giger, John Abercrombie, Christian Wallumrod, Alexander Knaifel, Miroslav Vitous, Louis Sclavis, Wolfert Brederode, Enrico Rava, Stefano Bollani and Paul Motian. Never heard of any/most of those, it hardly matters, as the duo of Villalobos and Loderbauer stretch out the sounds of the originals into spare rhythmic minimalism, looping and layering, adding subtle bits of rumble and crunch, deep pulses and abstract shimmer, fields of glitch and muted crunch, but to our ears, it sounds like very little was added to the mix, and much of the magic came from deftly manipulating the originals. The techno element is really negligible here, the sound is much more abstract avant jazz, or hushed minimal drift, in fact, the sound is so unique it's quite difficult to really describe simply. The sound actually reminds us quite a bit of Aussie free jazz minimalists The Necks, the same sort of subtle shifting sonic palette and the gradual evolution of sound. Opener "Reblop" is a hushed super spare bit of solo piano, wreathed in clouds of occasional cymbal shimmer, and some melodic harp, the notes on the piano wreathed in reverb, the cymbal shimmer strangely distorted, the wide open spaces peppered with soft synthy streaks and bloopy squelches, which often mirror the melody, it's really strangely pretty, but also subtly alien. "Recat" is about as close as things here get to techno, which is not that close, but the original brushed snare rhythm is looped into a clipped minimal electronic flecked skitter, that rhythm delicately processed and gradually transformed while all around it pianos and strings unfurl melodies that become gnarled and softly distorted into new shapes, the result a sort of warped lo-fi kraut-jazz. "Resvete" is super spare and spaced out, cymbal shimmer and angelic female vocals, Villalobos and Loderbauer's contributions so subtle, that barring a few glitchy bits, it's difficult to tell how different this version is than the original, quite we're guessing, but it's so deftly transformed, that it's not hard to imagine this as just some strange slab of experimental European jazz. And the tracks that sample Arvo Part, manage to make magical music even moreso, taking Part's lush liturgical drift and making it even more washed out and ethereal, mysterious and dreamlike.
One of our favorite tracks is "Reannounce", which is very tribal, almost African sounding, hypnotic rhythms, and processed chant like vocals, underpinned by some throat singing like buzz, and some wild almost free sounding percussion, "Recurrence" too with its lazy drumming, and slo-mo late night smokey slowed down jazz feel, the whir of the trumpet buzz turned into a muted drone, the sound almost like the music is melting. "Rebird" finds the duo building what sounds like an imagined field recording, underscored by delicate, slightly warped piano, and a barely there rhythm, while "Retikhiy" sounds like some sort of alien world music, or some reimagined forest folk transformed into looped electronic minimalism. We could really go track by track, every song here is mysterious and magical, the rare sort of record that transcends it's genre, it's hard imagine anyone into adventurous music not loving this. It's jazz, it's classical, it's electronic, it's plunderphonics, but it's also none of those, the sound truly more than its constituent parts. The extensive liner notes go into great detail about the creation of this collection of songs, explaining that the duo did not have access to the original tracks, so had to use the records themselves, and thus chose tracks where rhythms and instruments were isolated in the composition, in addition, gaps and pauses and record noise, as well as the natural room sound were also sound sources, with much of this improvised live, with the intention of "combining the functionality of reduced electronic structures with the living textures of ECM productions", with the most important thing being "to harmonize these two worlds, without them aspiring to mutually deactivate each other, to keep both - the organic and the electronic - in balance." So great, definite contender for record of the year, jazz, electronic, classical or otherwise!
What could be better than guy sporting serious razorburn for a cover photo? Not much else.
Vindva Mei's debut has warranted not only such a great cover but a release on Stilluppsteypa's label Fire Inc. This Icelandic duo's sound is not too far from the skeletal bleeps of the Raster and 12K labels but is even weird enough to be on Phthalo if given the chance. The IDM rhythms of Warp and Skam have been distilled to the simplest of gossamer melodies and terse electronic rhythms. Slow motion time-streched drones, backwards shortwave radio voices, and odd distorted flanges emerge from the post-techno proceedings.
Boy do we love Grime!! But we're getting a bit frustrated at the relative dearth of grime stateside. We can only listen to our Dizzee Rascal and Wiley records so many times. Plus to be honest, as much as we dig those, we're sort of hankering for something a little more, well, you know, grime-y! Overseas, you got Kano, Lethal Bizzle, Lady Sovereign, More Fire Crew and loads more but it's taken forever for any of their records to make it over here. But in the meantime, we've got the debut from the Virus Syndicate, courtesy of Mike Paradinas' Planet Mu label. And it's a corker. The thing with grime is, well, it's sort of like drum and bass, you just gotta love the sound. We can't get enough of the super distorted classic ragga drum and bass. So much so that we could listen to that shit forever. And we're beginning to feel the same way about grime. It's sort of like hip hop sure, but the rhythm is this super repetitive, slurry, stuttering beat, a very clumsy funk, over and over, every song has the same general head nodding shuffle, with grimy fuzz synth bass lines, and then maddening, tongue twisting flow over the whole thing. Virus Syndicate take that formula and give it their own twist. Big fat beats, throbbing and hiccuping, haunting stabs of operatic vocals, fuzzed out synths, burbling booming system bass, all rocking that instantly recognizable grime rhythm, while the Syndicate spit bizarre marble mouthed rhymes, talking trash, a wildly confusional flow, catchy and soulful, occasionally slipping into some almost Jamaican style toasting. So fucking awesome.
Also boasts some truly and brilliantly atrocious cover art (continued inside the cd booklet with a Virus Syndicate comic!).
