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 […]
12″ EP
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Label: Go Beat Format: 12″,CDS Appearing in four differing takes from the album version, “Of” is a slippery little track in its “Version” form, with various sound-science vocal samples drifting across its fairly straight-ahead riff with accompanying synth squeals, blips and fallout to tingle the spine and drop down into the realms of pitch-bent fun. The “Remix” gets more jazzy in the bass department, with the drums dropped […]
Label: Output Format: 12″,CDS Opening with an astrological description of someone with their aspect in Mars, “Glasshead” soon makes it like the groovy number to be expected from Four Tet‘s post-Trip Rock excursions in the last year or so, only here magnified, intensified and refined. Sonorous virtualised brass, real-world breakbeats and the strangely fashionable glass-chimes make for a propulsive undercarriage, circled by progressively wayward sax honks, nut-string stroke […]
Label: Warp Format: 12″,CDS A curiously accessible mire of vocal samples splutter and waft from and electronic soup from almost the first moment of “Windowlicker”, before Richard James applies some customarily deep-fried production to what could otherwise have been a languorous bass and kickdrum smoocher. Instead, linearity gets a darned good rogering, the various melodic lines pulped, smeared and bloated at the still-strange knobs and faders of one […]
Label: Warp Format: 12″,CDS One of the scarier tracks from his Organism album, “Year Of The Apocalypse” finds Jimi Tenor deploying the kind of sub-funky sounds and sequences which give swingbeaty house such a bad name and such a loose-limbed grotesqueness. That the subject is making love and partying hard in the face of Millennial doom is only to be expected, and engenders a certain amount of choral interludes and pitch-bent oscillators at […]
Label: MDZ Format: 12″ Oh my, 29 and then some minutes of one song. Well. They are thorough. “Gelbphase” in all five versions is a nice little sample of what the Oh. boys can do, complete with evidence of their love of the analogue and a healthy influence of 1970s video games. Oh’s own remix-Elektronauten, and the Metamatic Remix are not unlike a ear blast stroll through a […]
Label: Kranky (CD)/Constellation (Vinyl) Format: CDS,12″ Perhaps the criminally overused expression “intense” can be used with justification, just this once, to describe the sound of Godspeed You! Black Emperor. The mysterious Canadian nine-piece roll out another of those accelerative weighty soundscapes that we’d always hoped Glenn Branca would produce. Discipline and a telepathic, egoless sense of control push the multilayered epic “Moya” into peaks and troughs similar in […]
Label: 13th Moon Format: 12″ Taking one of the best tracks from Nocturnal Emissions and sticking it through the electronic mangle, Mr. & Mrs. Fiend embark on a high-octane blast through all the electro, techno, breakbeat and goddam’ rock machinations possible at once, topped off by Nik’s unchanged vocal style – demented. The amphetamine groove ASF have been on for most of their career seems somehow to be […]
Label: Domino Format: CDS,12″ Exhibiting a kind of Bristolian faux-gangsterism with sampler firmly in cheek, Matt Elliott is definitely getting more proficient with the drum & bass these days. Still spooky and atmospheric, the use of choral samples on the title track recalls the early unsettling soundscapes of Current 93 but with a beat – which is a pretty damn good idea too. Religious art is probably best […]
Label: KiffSM/PIAS Format: 12″, CDS Taking the only track from Kreidler‘s Appearance And The Park album to feature vocals, Mute‘s Daniel Miller adopts his Sunroof persona in collaboration with Gareth Jones to reconfigure the track in decidedly Eighties style – all arpeggiating FM keyboards and synth stylings – to initially amusing, then relaxingly suave effect, revisted on the slightly extended instrumental version which substitues analougue squiggles for the […]
Label: Warp Format: CDS, 12″ Plone have a nice ear for the uses of old technology, turning in three deceptively simple songs (which happens also to neatly provide the title for track two) , equal parts Pram and retro elevator music. “Plock” is a shimmery analogue bossanova featuring that most marvellous of processors, the Vocoder, while the aforementioned “Simple Song” recalls the naivete of early electronic music with […]
Label: Mute Format: CDS, 12″ How to make a remix EP, 1998-style: take a track from your last album (Control Data, in this case). Process in a variety of styles by Ultraviolence (Gabba, twice), No-U Turn (Drum & Bass) and, last but not least (apart from the original mix, naturally), current king of the version and the rewind, Alec Empire (er… JungleGabbaTechnoHipHop). Guaranteed to break the eardrums at […]
Label: Output Format: CDS, 2×12″ The first non-compilation solo release from Fridge’s Kieran Hebden is a one-track single (cunningly presented in DJ-friendly style as two one-sided 12-inches) whose title reflects its length – even if the CD does register various lengths on different players. Smoothly slipping from motorik breakbeats to fast beats, with a selection of instruments and samples flowing over the top of it all, ambient-style. Given […]
Label: Go Beat Format: CDS,12″ Having set up their own studio with all the creative freedom that allows, Fridge seem to be heading outwards further from their alleged post-Rock roots into the realms of cluttered Electronica, and as with Kieran Hebden‘s side project Four Tet their HipHop, jazz and even easy tendencies have more room to breathe. Kinoshita Teraska is split into two tracks, each having half the […]
Label: Asphodel Format: 12″ Sub Dub‘s percussionist Raz Mesinai manifests here in his Bedouin guise, deplying five tracks showcasing his cultural heritage through a New York filter. “Final Warning” has a persuasively swaying main drum loop, topped with stretched ululations and sirens which lend a hallucinatory character to the cross-pollinated groove, while “Do We Belong” shows that bagpipes are not a purely Celtic invention. Badawi mixes pipes, chants […]
Label: Fat Cat Format: 12″ Supremely mellow, fascinatingly layered micro-dubs from a country (Germany) teeming with super-proficient Electronica. Ripples, pulses, flows and then grows. Crackles, lo-fi sound sources and bass bleeps celeverly arranged to produce an all-suffusing glow of satisfying serenity, without descent into Ambient earwash. Why don’t record players have repeat buttons? -Freq1C-