The Water Rats, London 2nd November 1999 The Water Rats seems like a broken place, barely still pulsing with the life of the twenty or so people inside. I wonder if it was once posh, evidence: rubbed-off velvet on the too few bar stools, forgotten glass cases built into dingy walls, and a mid-size double paned front door, spread wide and chained open. It lets in the chill […]
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Label: Sub Rosa/Quatermass Format: CD, Limited LP Simon Pyke, AKA Freeform, has shown himself to be one of those producers of electronic music who fails singularly to conform to rigid genres and substylings thereof. He simply seems content to produce music within the formats open to someone with a bank of samplers, keyboards, mixers and effects units, regardless of constraints of what anyone else might have done along the way. Now that […]
LA2, London 25th October 1999 Prepared and hyped for Atari Teenage Riot, I was ready to hear loud fast music. What a treat it was that the fun started long before ATR ever came on. Other girls have done this, face it, MANY other boys have done this too, but something just chimes right for Lolita Storm. I can’t tell a single song title from Lolita Storm’s set. […]
Label: Sprawl Imprint Format: CD Assembled from the now-usual urban sprawl of sounds which make up the inspiration for much of Electronica’s current output, Me Shape is Simon Pyke‘s contribution to the clockwork maelstrom which characterises this apect of late Nineties music, and of which The Sprawl Imprint and club are particular exponents. Built up from two years of sound recordings and live sets, the album is filled with coiled energy, prowling into view as the […]
Label: Caipirinha Format: CD Datach’i sounds like a deranged child given a selection of technology, old and new, to play with, abuse, and generally mess up sound with. From the get-go, it’s a stream of blurting noise, scrawled low-end mania and samples to reinforce the infantile world of an unsatisfied toddler (on PCP?) – who has heard that they now know their ABC, but are as happy with […]
Label: Thrill Jockey Format: CDS,12″ Four songs of love as seen through the Continuous Cash-FlowTM filter of Mr. Bobby Conn, Chicago, hell, the world‘s most curious of crooners and estimable heir to the Seventies legacy of Funk-Soul-Rock singer-songwriter troubadour anti-messiahs. In other words, a star. There are two new songs from Mr. C. himself – “Free Love”, an epic, near-histrionic bass-slapping time-signature mangler and possessor of a typically […]
Label: Tone Casualties Format: CD,LP Is this what it’s like to wake up with Mr. Czukay every morning? Well, anyway, Holger’s come back and the general consensus is that he’s looking camp as ever. Good Morning Story is a nice wake up call, sampled generously with lots of Can and it shows. Mr. C. claims this to be his first time playing with an ordinary sampler, rather than […]
Label: EMI/Electrola Format: 12″,CDS Smoothness… There is nothing inherently wrong with this. It would be easy to bring the metaphor of the “well-oiled machine” into play in considering these four pieces. Is the situation of the metaphor the dominant theme in the existence of Kraftwerk? Even in the days of the Kosmische, there was this notion of reaching the cosmic, voyaging into outer space through inner space, and […]
Label: Soleilmoon Format: 3xCD Bundled together as a boxed set, these three releases bring together the three artists concerned in pairs on each CD via postal exchange of recordings, with the aim of creating a whole which draws more than merely the sum of its parts together. Packaged in appropriately earthy, decaying hues of green, brown and grey environmental close-ups, the set will also be released as individual […]
Label: MDZ Format: 10″ Taken from Oh.‘s recent Ecu album, “39,6” give no clues to its title in the curlicues of almost wistful synth trails, horizontal bass and crystal drum licks which make for a serenely cruising little ditty of a modest, soothing sort. The Sofa Surfers‘ mix offers up the slo-Funk to the main keyboard riff, dubbing up a collage of spreading fragments and taking the vibe […]
Label: Domino Format: CD,LP Mouse On Mars‘ sixth album continues to expand on their almost self-defining genre of energetically marvellously nice Electronica, spinning outwards from the opening processed acoustic guitars into to the humorous-interuptus whoopee-cushion funk of the highly appropriately-titled “Yippie”, and all points silly from there. Neither “nice” nor “silly” are meant a s platitudes – MoMars are decidedly both. Take the skewbald Vocoder loop of “Super […]
Label: Spunk! Format: CDS Trans Am must be the most versatile trio ever to call themselves a band. Who Do We Think You Are? is a terrific little six song showing of this as our boys slip slide right through thirty years worth of musical genres in less than an hour. A fast glance to the almighty (if slightly irritating) vocoder and little dips here and there in […]
Label: Force Inc. Format: 12″ The title track is something of a typical Techno Animal bass monster, with their characteristic funky breakbeats assuming the usual clattery position in relation to a rather pleasingly warbly bassline, shot through with some relatively restrained splatters of synthy knob-twiddling. As its Kevin Martin and Justin Broadrick at the controls, naturally everything tends to get taken into the extremes of dub delay and […]
Label: Chalice Format: CD, LP Coil have been on a long strange journey into a peculiarly English Pagan folk music, at once urban and ancient, Modern and eternal – and the recent addition of Thighpaulsandra to their collective (un)consciousness has only made things more intriguing. His main contribution to this latest mail-order only album shines through on the Ashra (or even Tangerine Dream…)-like electronic headtrip of the evocatively-titled […]
...long pieces of almost continuous splurges of distortion and dirtily-feeding back pickup-noise, amplifier hum, scuzz, detritus...
Label: Korm Plastics Format: CD Jonathan Coleclough has been a musical associate of such soundscrapers as Organum and Colin Potter, and Windlass is his first CD beyond a limited edition release on Robot Records. The album makes extensive use of Ambient drones to darkling effect, and has all the spectral hallmarks of the chilly wastes of post-Industrial head music. The welling bass tones lurk in murky, but warm, […]
Label: Warp Format: CD,LP Plone are apparently intent on creating timeless electronic melodies; it seems they might have succeeded. For Beginner Piano has ten such examples to offer for posterity, and the spread of influences from John Barry to Lee Perry via the chirping bleeps of their labelmates are evident from the opening tracks “On My Bus” and “Top And Low Rent” onwards. The charming little keyboard melody […]
Label: DHR Format: CD,2LP Lurking behind the Atari Teenage Riot pastiche cover and name is of course none other than Alec Empire, but in ever so strange a mood as to be simultaneously at his most inspired and deranged. Sourced entirely from the programmable music edition of a Gameboy, We Punk Einheit! takes the machine to its limits. Bleeping and blipping like a demented games console circa 1983, […]