Chris Carter – Moonlight

Optimo

This will play out. This will be roundly buggered, sliced and diced and shat out all over the lightflashes and discofloors of your local sleaze pit. It’s good music for dancing girls, car chases, hedge-trimming, car-jumping. Chris Carter has the Abba fixations, of course, but the Devil’s in the disco. The Neurotic Drum Band remix (reimagining) maybe slows the beat down a little to create something that feels vaguely reminiscent of Spacemen 3’s “Big City;” a disco slur, narcotized but just danceable, if you’re prepared to shamble and wave. It’s not Italo; only partly Homoerotic. The press release tells you it’s “ultra cosmic-a-fying it for an ultra-headtrip psychedelic spaceflight!” but it feels a little earthier than that, Northern even; the sound of a Rugby or Widnes disco-bar with a headful of research chemicals (their twinkly names encoded into the music) and a full glass of Tetley. This is a good thing, I think.

Oneohtrix Point Never pipe(s) up on a digitial-only remix. He starts buzzing, thunders for a while, like the opening of Returnal and only lets in a moment of electro-pastoralism after the sawtooth openings have had their way for 4½ minutes or so… More rumbles, some Orbital-like squiggles. There’s nothing added here (there’s too much added here) and if this is an attempt to make Chris Carter sound more slurred and beyond then it’s missing the point (of Carter, of Chris and Cosey, even of Throbbing Gristle). Chris Carter’s machines are slurred and beyond because he’s clearly attempting to make them glistening and pristine. They don’t need processing; they find their own slurred path in amongst the glitter.

-Loki-