Label: Flesh Format: 12″
Flesh Records take on the dancefloor with their blend of extended electro-techno-gothic, neatly introduced by the throbbing smash-to-be of ST AP 00‘s “Mr GD”, in which someone with a very keen enthusiasm for David Bowie describes a sinister encounter of the less than savoury narrator with the little old Mr Gravedigger. All this is set to a pounding dance track with some seriously groovy beats underneath to the brassy echoes of Yello and some foregrounded synth-cymbal smashes and rewinds for hands in the air effect – only these hands are probably groping from the grave, á la Italian Giallo film posters of the Seventies. This is a blindingly good track; redolent with rhythmic dynamics and a foggy atmosphere which could only be enhanced by massive great gouts of smoke on a suitably darkened dancefloor.
Second up from ST AP 00 is “Nanobots”, which turns the tables into stripped-down, somewhat flatulent beats which would make Muslimgauze proud while a weary voice intones the title over a swirl of scarred synths. Odd. For the AA side, Flesh mainstay Midnight Mike remixes Zongamin‘s “Blind Holiday” into a high-clapping detour from the Madonna track, for which the repeated airy female “Holiday” vocal is offset by a rather harshly pitchshifted man observing “It would be so nice” with an air of pulsing dark house menace. Mike’s own “Halloween” is indeed the title music from the film of the same name, put through the techno shredder. Those bleeping John Carpenter synths get a tearing accompaniment to bring up the shivery chill factor among the spine-tingling drum rolls and yet more sinister low-mixed voices. You won’t know whether to laugh or scream as the bass and mid-range keyboards set jangled nerves a-tingling; definitely one to bring down all those over-happy dancefloor fiends.
The shame about this EP is that it’s not getting a general release, so start trawling those dodgy clubs to get a taste of the grave in advance of hoped-for future Flesh appearances for these tracks, especially “Mr. GD” (though it also appeared on the Flesh Records Presents LP). However, there are full-length MP3 downloads currently available of “Nanobots” and “Halloween” from Flesh, so get ’em while you can.
-Freq1C-
