Unicorn Hard-On – Weird Universe

Spectrum Spools

Unicorn Hard-On is a solo project of one Valerie Martino. She’s a great rhythm chaser, tugging those dry arithmetical presets in a piranha splattered synapse of pulsing inputs. Now, I’ve got to admit, I’m not the greatest dance music devotee, but Weird Universe is certainly throwing enough solid hooks and neon-splashed chameleons to satisfy my curiosity.

It seems to be diving straight out of the charity shop door with a trolley full of ’80s extended mix culture surprised to find itself on a future high-street of déjà vu backslashes and trance-like blisters. A heady gyro-infatuated joy to the ears, twitching with vitality. Those layered-up beats  and pulsing percussions all tentacle wrapping in oily skating hues, like some liquidised rainbow of sensation, every listen onion skinning more of its glorious details. “Quizz” has this satisfying para-militant stomp to it, a bassy soup with plenty of mud splattered rats sceptically gushing underneath. I’m catching a faint vocal/machine mirage, elusively saying “Time is a afterthought…?” The jostling rub leaking a reality-bending ooze dribbling on through every track.

“Night Diamond” continues to pile on the pleasure as randomised blood falls blissfully through alkaloid harmonics. Those gilded jets of the orient throwing out a doppelgangered delusion of spinning crystal. A trance-like core garrulous with its riches, contrasting with the spaghetti junction diode a-go-go of “Houndstooth” and its bunny-boxing silhouettes. The spittle sucked sleaze of “Wet Pet” is great too, smearing a “NASA-Arab” whir over a lazy river of beats, occasionally bespeckled in comic thunder, the ingredients falling nicely into place as a kinetic cloud of nanomites crawl within like a fairy-lit rash.

The raspy clasp of “Mysterious Prism” ends the album in a twee mental jag of  pixels and bleeping tropicana. Binary fed toddlers monkeying around with your insides, throwing out your limbs at random angles, whilst the stereo decompiles itself in false colour bows, shot out of an MDMA raygun. Superb, and ridiculously addictive.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-