At once a split release and a collaboration, the first instalment in Front and Follow‘s new series of joint releases, The Blow, finds IX Tab and Hoofus sharing the honours on this limited edition cassette and download edition.
Hoofus weighs in with ten solo tracks, splinters of brightly-found electronics looping and sputtering to the cosmic vibrations with all the liquid intensity of arpeggiations set loose, only to be corralled and shaped into expansive pulsations and wibbling threnodies. Moods shift and coalesce, the reverberant sounds of echo effects and spatchcocked oscillations recurving into a revealed state of abstract exposition and discordant rhythm.
Vintage in tone and shimmery in feel, Hoofus seems determined to encapsulate every decade of electronic music making from the Sixties to Nineties and perhaps a little bit further. The radiohponics are present and correct, Clustering together in waves of Moebius strips played with all the mechanical muscularity to be found at the Cabaret Voltaire. Which is not to say that it’s derivative, but more well and thoroughyl versed in a musical heritage that informs its basic parameters. IX Tab’s five solo contributions may perhaps be equally in thrall to esoteric English electronica rather than kosmische proto-techno, but with Saxon Roach‘s distinctive identity shimmering through the repeating vocal snippets deracinated and filtered into a hallucinogenic palimpsest. The barest subtle inflection in the repeats can trigger faded memories of earnestly exploratory witchcraft documentaries from bygone years, brewed into timestretched brews that mushroom into disoriented washes of aetherial discord and melted globular soundscapes before the fade into dissolution. Reedy pipings and freshly-brightened melodies evoke a form of psychedelic folk music that is closer in spirit to the meandering trails of a ghostly, pre-hippy magic(k)al ritual than to the real ale and occasional weedy whiff around the peripheries the summertime festival circuit.Four collaborative tracks form a sort of centrepiece of the Blow Vol I, at least when listened to digitally in the prescribed track order. The best of both artists’ approaches collide and combine, Roach’s time-dilation systems melting and overdubbing Hoofus’ undulating technoid curves. “Someone’s got to make me stop”, repeats a slightly desperate voice on “The Ploughs & Machines”; but there must and shall be more of this sort of thing.
-Linus Tossio-
