Label: Expanding Format: 7″ Abfahrt Hinwil‘s contribution to the Expanding Records EVS Series clicks and wheezes to life with “Links Oben”, built around a distracted melody constructed from synthetic bells. The undercurrents gurgle, fizz and whirr with biomechanical trills, keeping the electronica sweetly chilled. “The Light” starts off langorously swirled, rotating on a synthetic textural axis while deep down a bass tone generates vibrations. A gradual insertion of […]
Freq1C
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Staubgold This is one of those albums which goes on forever, but with the pleasant companionship of days passing and the changes of the quality of light and temperature on one side, and the intensity of a nightmare storm battering on the other. The title is German for Keep Cool, and the long slow unwind of electronic tones is certainly chilled out to a specific degree of mellowness […]
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 […]
Electrowerkz, London 4 May 2001 Noise and gunge and digital Punk Rock descend on paintball hall Electrowerkz, and even if the night is also a launch for the No More Rock N Roll compilation, it really does have some stomping moments to put a writhe on the dead face of Sid Vicious and perhaps Kurt Cobain too. Why? Because the kids jump up and down, make temporary mosh […]
Label: Planet µ Format: CD C(l)attery digital songs for cats from Mr Aaron Funk, Esq., of Winnipeg, Canada. Featuring an opener which sets the pace with eerie wails which don’t sound feline as such, but might once have done so, and they certainly make more recognizable guest appearances later. Dastardly electronic Jazz like Squarepusher was or AFX can be; slippery as a kitten and twice as playful, Songs […]
Label: Warp Format: CD,2LP Dammit, Autechre can still confound and confuse as much as they’ve ever done. Skims of the sound of the natural world meeting the digital and electronic mesh like no-one else has quite managed to acheive, despite the legions of followers who somehow get the sound but never quite the feel just right. Perhaps it’s not just the selection of what could be a ball-bearing revolving endlessly, stochastically around the […]
The Spitz, London 26 April 2001 The I/O event at The Spitz was a little bit of a nerd-fest (meant in the best possible way), as several generations of audio technophiles opened up their various laptop computers and let rip with the best in glitchry they could muster for the occasion. To a shifting realtime backdrop of manipulated visuals, the fizzes, pops and rumbles of digital experimentation shuffled […]
The Fridge, London 12 April 2001 Autechre play in the dark to an audience bursting the seams of The Fridge. The auditorium is packed, the crowd heaving without much dancing going on, and the beats are fractured into shapes that would make rhythmic movement something of an exacting chore. People seem slightly nonplussed, but no-one’s scratching their chin; or at least not in full view. The sounds which […]
Label: Domino (Europe)/Thrill Jockey (North America) Format: 12″,CDS Some high-energy silliness from the Mouse On Mars folk, running straight at Garage with a wild yelp and a cheesy grin before folding it up into bouncy breaks and a full-mouthed wade through distorted vocals, better tasted on the full-length mix. Smartly insane, as is the electronic detritus swept up by the trio and Herbert, AKA Dr Rockit into “DJ […]
Label: Staalplaat Format: CD 386DX is proclaimed as the world’s first cyberpunk rock band; what it really is is an ancient Wintel box playing MIDI files complete with song-synth software vocals. Programmed by Alexei Shulgin, the PC has stood alone as a busker, and played live across Europe and America, which seems like a fun conceptual idea, as most of these files (or similar enough MIDI versions) can […]
Label: Caciocavallo Format: 2CD As might be expected, Robin Storey‘s take on drum & bass is somehwat denser than the usual clatter of hyperspeed breaks, rolllllls and rewinds. Instead, the two discs of Cold War Drum ‘n’ Bass are crammed with unfurling meditations in rhythm and texture, linked by the ideas of paranoia and mutually assured destruction of a childhood surrounded by the hardware and attitudes of unfought […]
Label: Force-Inc. Format: CD,3LP Auch‘s Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye was by all accounts one of the albums which brought the glitch to the wider dancefloors filled with the minimal Techno put out by Force-Inc and similarly-inclined labels. Here it gets demixed further into the realms of attenuated, deracinated clickety-snips and thumping grooves alike by eleven co-creators (plus one crackling self-mix) of electronic bleeps, belches and occasional blasts. No-one gets a track title, just […]
Label: Mego Format: CD One of the elegant possibilities proposed by this record is of the recursion of loop upon loop; as skeins of glitch or oscillator pulse become intertwined around, along or through each other, they work into the backbrain and get the blood streaming to electronic time signatures derived as much from the sine wave frequency as from intervention by Ilpo Väisänen. One of the legacies […]
Label: God*Factory Format: CD How to make a milk shake, the Laboratory Of Sonic Discovery way: Ingredients: Milk, soya or otherwise as preferred; Vanilla ice cream or non-dairy substitute; Soft fruit such as bananas or strawberries; 1 litre jug (preferrably non-shatter or plastic); CD player; Amplifier; The largest speakers available, preferably with a rating of 100 watts per channel or more; 7 Songs/77 Frequencies CD Method: Warn neighbours […]
Label: Soleilmoon Format: CD Structured around bursts of wheezing Drum & Bass breakbeats, Nigel Ayers‘ latest missive from the borderlands of music broadcasts at a frequency attuned to a zeitgeist-surfing mix of attenuated rhythms, (implied) anti-monarchism and community space travel. All this and an origami sleeve which builds into a peculiar design (instructions enclosed) and Futurist Antiquarianism makes for a rounded album which develops Nocturnal Emissions‘ edgy sound into […]
Label: MDZ Format: 12″ “Charme 75″, taken from Oh.‘s Upper Disker album, finds the gang in Housey mode, chuckling their abundant collection of analogue synths along to a slippery Funk-based track which does the dancefloor thing in spades. Warmth is the key here, and the knowledge that this is the result of live interaction between people and not just machines adds further to the pleasures of the basic […]
Label: Digi-Dub Format: CD The sounds on this recording were originally derived from pieces of detritus found at the Skrot Centralen scrapyard in Uppsala, Sweden, and composed into the Scrap Bodies soundtrack for the Su-En Butoh Company for their world tour of the dance performance. Lee Digidub and friends – Dodo, Liquid Acrobat, Egon Zoo, King Bimble – have taken the basic samples and put them through their […]
Label: Domino Format: CDS,12″ “What Is It With You?” clicks into life with a flurry of timestretched rimshots, snare trills and attenuated vocal samples which really could have been disastrous in their religio-ethnodelic wavering, but aren’t in the least bit. In fact, this is such a shockingly sonorous trip into the Drum & Bass vault that it’s scary. Strings rise and fall, distended voices weave in and out […]