DISCOGRAPHY

The latest release in the ongoing (and excellent) Brainwashed Handmade series, Music For Planetarium is quite a departure in sound for one Jack Dangers, who already released his tenth album this year under the name Meat Beat Manifesto (Autoimmune). Dangers, who has been releasing music not only at a fairly prolific pace over the past twenty years, has also managed to keep a remarkable level of consistency, and one could argue that his dub-inflected music helped pioneer the way for different splinter-takes on the genre (like dubstep). You'll get no such booming beats and head-crushing rhythms here, though, as this eleven-song, forty-five minute release instead spins off into interstellar space, mixing fuzzy radio static sounds with deep bass rumbles and other groaning drones that definitely call to mind the title. Recorded for the T.I.T. Planetarium in Budapest, this is largely cold, sometimes creepy tape music that sweeps and haunts with undefined figures that lurk around the edges. It's a bit strange too, because the opener "Explanation..." actually sounds like a fairly typical beginning for Dangers, as an old voice sample sets the tone as a rumbling bassline threatens to overtake things. It ramps down as the song ends, though, and from there out it's a shot into more murky depths. As mentioned above, the album seems aptly-titled, but really one could project just about anything onto the amorphous sounds. I certainly wouldn't want to be listening to "Large Metallic Cloud" or "Pinwheel Galaxy" while exploring an abandoned building, but at the same time I imagine that "Polarissima Borealis" or "Fourcade-Figuero" would make the perfect soundtrack for exploring frozen tundra. Other artists have done similar work, and I'm most reminded of Biosphere's excellent Autour De La Lune and even Robert Henke's Signal To Noise. It's not quite the usual work from Dangers, but if you like the aforementioned slabs of ambience, the limited Music For Planetarium is definitely worth snagging before it's gone. - Aaron Coleman, Almost Cool

Over the years, Jack Dangers, maestro behind Meat Beat Manifesto, has made some interesting, thought-provoking, and sometimes intense music. His newest release, Music for Planetarium, consists of eleven tracks commissioned for a planetarium in Budapest, and these eleven tracks most certainly feel like space. These songs are primarily drones, quiet drones, hushed drones, beautiful drones, and they remind me of the wonderful score to 2001. As such, Music for Planetarium is the perfect soundtrack for calm mornings and for quiet nights, and, if you so desire, for star-gazing. According to the notes, it was "recorded under a quilt at night in Marin County, CA." Hmmm...interesting! I've enjoyed the quietness of the tones on this; it's one of the more relaxing records I've heard this year. - Press Play Record

Meat Beat Manifesto have been on the music scene long enough now for the term veteran to seem almost painfully apt. Yet after ten albums and more than twenty years spent riding the choppy waves of contemporary music, they have somehow remained on the outskirts of things while like-minded artists have lapped up the applause. One need only think of what happened to Orbital after the brown album to see the vastly different trajectories the two superficially quite similar bands have taken in the last decade and a half. Indeed, while the Hartnoll brothers were almost instantly deified following their first appearance at Glastonbury in 1994, MBM moved to Trent Reznor's Nothing Records and promptly slid out of view. But several records have followed since, and while the Orbital bandwagon has long since shuddered to a halt, Jack Dangers remains, his status assured through longevity as much as anything else. Autoimmune finds him in a typically restless mood, flitting intermittently between techno, dub, breakbeat and, perhaps most surprisingly, dubstep. Yet when one thinks of Planet Mu's increasing associations with the dubstep scene, it perhaps shouldn't raise too many eyebrows to see Dangers experimenting with the form here. The label has moved beyond its early incarnation as a slightly quirky younger brother to Aphex Twin's Rephlex stable and is now one of the most high-profile record labels putting out dubstep records today. Thus, in theory at least, Autoimmune slots neatly into the broad and accommodating musical policy of the label. When we learn from Dangers, however, that his intention here is to intertwine dubstep with his earlier techno-inflected sound, the pigeonholing seems less appropriate. And so the music that results is more an all-encompassing attempt to swallow up several musical genres in one audacious mouthful than anything else. This has its advantages, in that it allows the album to go off in different directions, often at the same time. Tracks as varied as the spacey, glitchy techno of Guns 'n' Lovers and the ragga rhythms of I Hold The Mic! show off the success of such an approach. But they also water down the album's central thrust. What at times looks certain to turn into a deep, dark examination of dubstep mechanics falls away before any momentum can be genuinely sustained. This leaves excellent stand-alone tracks like Hellfire looking a little lost, and gives the album's overall structure a ragged, confused feel. Which is a shame, because there is almost a very good album here. The notoriously eclectic Dangers might not be one to admit it, but his own magpie aesthetic could now and again do with being very gently kicked into touch. Yet with so many artists from the scene's early days now too rich or too musically adrift to retain any relevance, it's refreshing to see a man in his forties continuing to tap into the sound of today without seeming decades out of date. - Robert Rowlands, The Milk Factory

cover image The tenth studio album by Jack Dangers' main musical outlet takes a maximalist approach, combining apocalyptic dubstep and industrial-strength breakbeats with the assimilative spirit of a beat hacker. In the process, he creates an album true to the MBM legacy: one foot in cyber-age cross-genre multimedia assemblage, and one foot firmly planted in the timeless psychedelic ocean of sound. Autoimmune refers to reactions which inolve the body's immune system misrecognizing certain constituent parts of the self, and attacking them as if they were foreign invaders, the other. In a world in which fiercely pitched ideological and physical battles are being waged in the name of nationhood, religion, ethnicity and class--all of which hinge on the differential identity of self and other--autoimmunity becomes an interesting metaphor for political and cultural unrest. This bodily metaphor may be particularly close to Jack Dangers, as he suffers from psoriatic arthropathy (the Singing Detective disease), an autoimmune disorder, and thus is the living embodiment of the self turned against itself, the breakdown of the "body politic" metaphor in the age of unprecedented control, wiretapping, globalization, climate change, sleeper cells and hacktivism. Though the embodied, rhythmic ("meat beat") manifestoes of Dangers have always danced at the edge of politics, this album seems particularly apocalyptic, an acknowledgment of a world gone mad. The album opens with the introductory "International," trying to cleanse the geopolitical borders literally and metaphorically from the outset. The dense layers of sound and samples from radio and television place the album immediately in the territory that MBM inhabits so well: the multimedia, audiovisual perceptual landscape. "I Hold the Mic!" is pulse-pounding dubstep with dancehall vocals and yawning layers of echoplexed sounds, the audio equivalent of Tokyo's Ginza district as seen in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, a teeming human metropolis in which all markers of nationality, ethnicity and language have disappeared, and all that remains is a confounding, extra-geographical hybrid. "Hellfire" gets more diabolical, with a vocal formant synth spitting out nonsense syllables over a deep, resonant dubstep groove that keeps dipping itself into the fiery magma of distortion, with haunting X-Files melodies weaving in and out, and frequent samples of the familiar phrase "This is a test." It's interesting to compare this track to something that The Orb might have done in the late 1990s: the techniques are similar, but MBM ends up with a track that is less playful, more urgent. "Children of Earth" is a standout, beginning with a child intoning "Hello from the children of planet Earth," and quickly entering the land of loping, rubbery riddims and elastic acid basslines that fly across the stereo channels. It's a particularly frightening soundworld, bearing some similarity to the backing tracks created by The Bug and J.K. Broadrick for their Techno Animal hardcore HipHop project. On tracks like this and "Guns n' Lovers," MBM seems to nod to past associations with industrial music, as these rhythms never tire of toying with barely-reigned-in distortion, constantly flirting with the red, and never shying away from playing up the machine aesthetic, reminding us of our technological inheritance rather than attempting to obscure the methods of production. "Return to Bass" sounds like something that might be at home on the Ant-Zen label, if any of the artists on Ant-Zen were interested in bringing some groove along with their taste for violent distortion. It's Miami Bass for a generation weaned on Venetian Snares and Otto Von Schirach. "62 Dub" is the closest Dangers gets to bringing a rocksteady, traditional dub groove, but it is still dark and distorted as fuck, with treated didgeridoo (a la Love's Secret Domain-era Coil), and echo drops that make me feel like I've suddenly lost my footing and I'm falling through a vacuum. "Colors of Sound" is something else entirely, a whole track given over to the chirping of analog synths, weird alien skronk from a galaxy of wacky oscillators and filters, complete with tape-cuing sounds just like vintage musique concrete. It's an interesting ambient stopgap, and sounds like nothing else on the album. Eclectic is never a bad word in my book. Then comes my favorite track, "Spanish Vocoder," which combines the hardcore breakbeat of earlier tracks with some devious and delicious Detroit electro action. I don't mind HipHop and dubstep, but electro is like crack to me, and Dangers really knows how to bring the Cybotron in his own inimitable style. Though this track certainly feels a brighter and less apocalyptic than the rest of the album, it nevertheless maintains an intensity and urgency, with chopped-up vocoderized vocals and layers of choral voices weaving in and out of the mix. The didgeridoo is also back, this time treated to sound like a buzzsaw. By the end, the track fades out into ambient territory, with only the vocodered voice left to frantically attempt to communicate its message, fading out into deep space. MBM certainly aren't the first to link up electronic music with cyber-age political outrage, but they do an excellent job of it. Part of what makes Autoimmune work is that its nods to contemporary trends--British dubstep, HipHop, post-Jungle IDM--are combined with sounds that are utterly out of fashion, and would sound more at home with the outmoded '90s chillout-rave or breakbeat sound. This isn't a problem for Dangers, who is clearly uninterested in staking out a clear position in the marketplace, instead allowing his eclecticism free reign. Paradoxically, this gives the album a timeless quality, as it moves between eras and styles effortlessly, evoking the contemporary mediascape in which time seems indefinitely frozen, and past and present sprawl out in front of us on the magic screen, organizing themselves in infinite combinations, with unpredictable results. - Jonathan Dean, Brainwashed

Meat Beat Manifesto's brainchild, Jack Dangers, has said of his new material on Autoimmune that he feels "closest" amongst his sonic peers to those in the dubstep scene. Cynical ears might attribute Dangers's remarks to a half-hearted guerilla marketing campaign by a has-been hipster trying to make his rusty wires relevant to disintegrating audiences. This, however, reflects a poor sense of history. Dangers has for years been a mystic figure lurking around in the nursery at the genesis of myriad electronic fashions and fancies. His early solo work, in print for the first time in 20 years as last year's Archive Things: 1982-1988, sounds like something that could be debuting at this year's No Fun Festival. Pre-Meat band Perennial Divide was one of the loudest bands of its time, and an early fusioneer of squeal and dance beats. Meat Beat Manifesto's first album, Storm the Studio, established the outfit as an uncompromising force of sampledelic sound collage (the title comes from a William S. Burroughs snippet), borrowing ideas liberally from hip-hop, which was still shunned in those days, even in the rockist college scene. And though they came to be defined by hip-hop, and later, dub, Meat Beat Manifesto never exceeded its welcome within the genre limits and began to evolve outwardly to both anticipate and develop the margins of EBM, drum n' bass, trip-hop, big beat, illbient, ambient, and even mashups through Dangers's production work for Emergency Broadcast Network. I'd even go so far as to call Subliminal Sandwich an early hauntological masterwork. Yet, as far out as Meat Beat Manifesto's sound reached, it maintained commonalities (subterranean bass, funky breaks, atomic age samples) that got the band incongruously pegged as trend hoppers who kept making the same album. True to form, Autoimmune stays the same by being different. The samples are present, but sparse and redistributed in a way that almost makes them feel obsolete. Past Manifestoes have weltered in a kitsch aural collision of various pasts, but many of Autoimmune's more exciting moments come from its embrace of modernism, like its dubsteppers ("Lonely Soldier", "Guns N Lovers"). The signature subsonic bass remains on these and other tracks, the same one that inspired rumors that the band once hit the brown note at an early gig, but the bass's biophysical targets are here geared more towards rumble pack shocks of the gut rather than ass-shaking vibrations inspired to move the legs on up. It's perhaps Meat Beat Manifesto's first ghettoblaster, riddim and bruise for an car ride across the new industrial landscape. Years after the days of industrial music, the new sounds of kling klang are the pin drops in isolated and condemned factories, the moans of urban ghettos, and the robotic arms of tighteningly regimented power structures. "Hellfire" skitter-beats across a dubscape of short-wave radio squeals and hiccupping voices from the real emergency broadcast network ("this is only a test"), with the addition of minimalist high-pitched Mellotron notes making for a maddeningly incessant and dark journey. "Less" and "62 Dub" achieve similar ends with little to no melody. Warped effects and grinding echodrones guide the way through these songs and highlight Dangers's brilliance as a producer who works with a meticulous layer-cake methodology. Each of these tracks, much like the best of dubstep, contains a fungal aura of inertia creeps that harnesses threat and terror without ever going in for an attack. When several voices appear from the ether to simply repeat the word "nothing" in "Less", as if the song was spiraling downward until it reached oblivion, the antagonistic nihilism, especially in one particular vocoded robot who sings the word "nuuuh-thing" in a mocking tone, leaves an unmistakable chill rolling down one's back. Dangers has been particularly prolific these past few years, releasing a dub re-interpretation of RUOK?, musique concrete work for Important Records, and even a jazz album with Thirsty Ear. Along with Autoimmune, these experiments finally make Meat Beat Manifesto sound like an adventurous band trying out new things rather than making the most Meat Beat Manifesto interpretation of varying styles. That makes Autoimmune's failures more acutely upsetting. Opener "International" is a minute and 40 seconds long, goes nowhere beyond a mere introduction, and feels like the MBM business card. It has the token global radio sign-ons, a stale familiar break, and some sampled brass hits that fall totally out of step with the rest of the album. Worse, the track returns in "reprise" form at album's end to function as opening and closing credits. Dangers would have done fine to jump right in with the frantic reggaeton of "I Hold the Mic", which bears some resemblance to Subliminal Sandwich's "Nuclear Bomb" (both feature Daddy Sandy on vocals), though not nearly as apocalyptic as that track or the next few that follow on Autoiummune. While "I Hold the Mic" succeeds by being derivative of a style perfected by Meat Beat Manifesto years ago that happened to be ahead of its time (making it quite relevant now), "Spanish Vocoder" just feels like a tired retread. Repeating the bleeps and bloops of legendary Meat Beat Manifesto songs like "It's the Music" is not necessarily a bad thing, but "Spanish Vocoder" is tame and tepid, which cuts against the profusion of dense architecture elsewhere in this collection. "Young Cassius", featuring the San Francisco MC Azeem rapping atop substandard Meat Beat Manifesto fare, is a pure hip-hop track whose backing music essentially amounts to a canny breakbeat and some flimsy deep bass curdles. It's not the only venture back to hip-hop though. "Solid Waste" revives the monotone, almost slam poetry-esque Dangers rap featured on so many early Meat Beat recordings. The tactic has aged pretty well, actually, all things considered. Dangers uses the lyrical opportunity to rail against the vapor trails that the title material, defined in an opening stretch-marked sample as "the visible leftovers of our consumption", imprints against the international psyche to the point where "Common sense seems to take offense" and "Life has lost all its appeal". It's hard not being transported to a different time when hearing the track, which used to be part of why you turned on a Meat Beat Manifesto record. Retro-retro futurism isn't nearly as appealing as the real thing, though. And on Autoimmune, there's too much good nowism going on to settle for imitations. - Timothy Gabriele, PopMatters

You're Skyping a friend who's studying in Europe, while WOWing a player in Japan, while live-blogging the news reports of a protest in Tibet. What time is it? Where are you? Who, even, are you? These were questions you might have been able to ask before you entered the Matrix. Not anymore. Bookended by the tracks "International" and "International Reprise," Meat Beat Manifesto's latest album Autoimmune charts the global map of this electronic age. Autoimmune remains true to MBM's dance-club roots. Its five-minute tracks reveal little more to concentrating listeners than to listeners distracted by dance partners' legs. MBM doesn't set out to surprise the listener. That's not to say that the songs remain static. They morph undercover-a flow of sound, one element bleeding into another, rather than a shift. Throughout the album, voices (at times British, at times Jamaican, at times Spanish, Portuguese, Russian), drum rhythms, city sounds and digital glitches all share the same soundscape. Reduced to zeroes and ones, the sounds of the lived world enter our ears as binary bricolage. More than just reinterpreting the sounds of the known world through computer circuitry, MBM discovers unknown cyberspaces. "Spanish Vocoder" begins on a city street but then repositions the listener at the bottom of the sea, the sounds muffled under water; then in outer space, cosmic rays shooting off into infinite; and then in a dungeon, wet drips echoing against stone walls, before ending with a feedback glitch fade out. Informed by the Internet and gaming, today's listener navigates this fragmentary positioning with ease. Modem dial-up rings and gaming soundtracks, however, don't count as music for most. MBM's robo aesthetic, more HAL than Haydn, might pass for music at a laser tag arena, but not on an iPod. -Ian Ferguson, The Daily Californian

"Autoimmune," the latest disc from influential electro-innovator Jack Dangers, is an electronic melting pot that retains the traditional Meat Beat Manifesto sound while shifting into new musical territory. Though the opening track's sliced-up breakbeats and public radio samples echo 1998's "Actual Sounds and Voices," the album soon veers off into Autechre-style glitch with "Less," distorted proto-dub with "Solid Waste," Download-esque sound-collage with "Colors of Sound," and nearly every electronic genre in between. MBM records have never been known for sticking to one specific style, but "Autoimmune" sees Dangers continuing to explore and combine even further musical regions. Just look to the track "Young Cassius," which takes some furious MCing, then mashes them up with trip-hop atmospherics, big beat style breaks and vocoded samples. And if that isn't enough to satisfy you, it's followed by "Guns N' Lovers," which sounds like bar music from a William Gibson novel. If you're already a Meat Beat Manifesto fan, "Autoimmune" will give you another solid reason to look down upon the uninformed plebs with disdain. If you're new to Dangers' sound-stylings, but you've liked some form of electronica, be it industrial, big beat, drum and bass, IDM, trip-hop, or anything else under the bloody sun, this is as great album to start with. There may not be anything as hook-laden as "Paradise Now" or "Asbestos Lead Asbestos," but the album makes up for it through its sheer sonic variety. Consider it a vaccine against your stagnating record collection and hook yourself up now. - Calder Fertig, ABORT Magazine

Meat Beat Manifesto (a band hardly needing an introduction) offer a stellar slab of fried sounds. Side A, "Lovefingers," is a Silver Apples cover, which opens with a clip of a woman retelling a story of her husband (I think) claiming he'd been attacked by a spaceship. This leads perfectly into a catchy, psychedelic and mutated groove, bringing to mind early Faust. This comparison is hammered home when a blast of oscillators and fuzzy filters splatter themselves across the rest of the grooves. Side B follows a similar pattern with "Radio Free Republic." Starting with a voice sample (presumably from a b-movie), it moves into a heavily rhythm-centric pattern which slowly develops over a shifting pallette of synthesizer bleeps and bloops. - Dick Baldwin, FakeJazz

Where in the past Jack Dangers was the man you seek out for some pre-Big Beat busy prehistoric electronics and bollock kicking breaks here we find him at his monitor a little more relaxed. Still peppering his tracks with samples, he moves further into a Hip-Hop Techno area on "Radio Free Republic" where aggression and pace are not the norm. More interestingly is the Silver Apples cover on the A side which is a short blast of harsh electronic pop ending prematurely in short wave radio abuse. - Scott McKeating, Stylus

We have another sexy Brainwashed 7" in this week. This one is by Meat Beat Manifesto and it's on super thick weapon stylee grey vinyl. You know someone ordered a record this week and referred to it as a plate. I've never had that happen to me before but it did amuse me. Holding this sturdy little fella makes me realise if you didn't like the music you could tape up the hole in the middle and use it as some kind of stupid dining service. However if you did that it would be criminal cos here we have a totally cool slab of Jack Dangers instrumental hip hop infused brilliance which doesn't sound too unlike Boards of Canada to be honest. And there's a cracking Silver Apples cover of Lovefingers on the B side. This be my single of the week... - Norman Records

Acknowledged as an innovator in the electronic music scene, MBM continues to stretch sonic boundaries and influence new generations of sound activists. Past production/remixing projects include Public Enemy, David Bowie, Orbital, Nine Inch Nails, David Byrne, Bush, Depeche Mode, and Tower Of Power. Supporting the group on this release are Blue Series alumni Craig Taborn on keyboards, Bad Plus skinsman Dave King, and Peter Gordon on flute. "Without MBM's groundbreaking amalgams of hip-hop and industrial dance music, modern dance music genres such as big beat and drum and bass wouldn't exist...one of Britain's most inventive practitioners of sampladelic funk"--Alternative Press.

Jack Dangers' latest album continues to push the envelope. Jack was one of the main innovators of electronic music in the 1990s. Nowadays he has turned his attention to merging electronic music with jazz. At The Center is a hypnotic synthesis of the two worlds. These compositions feature rhythms similar to those found on earlier Meat Beat Manifesto releases...but the instrumental layers are quite different. The songs on this album are extremely fluid and trippy and feature the talents of Craig Taborn (keyboards), Dave King (drums), and Peter Gordon (flute). In many cases, the music on this disc sounds otherworldly and peculiar...and yet those solid funky rhythms somehow manage to hold things together nicely. This album may lose many early MBM fans but if so...those early fans will, in the end, be the real losers. Excellent material from a man who is still in his prime. (Rating: 5+) - LMNOP

When I was in high school, my friends and I used to have this discussion all the time about how Jack Dangers had such a signature sound that he could take anyone else's song and remix it into something that was unmistakably Meat Beat Manifesto. It shouldn't come as any surprise then that some fifteen years later when Dangers has taken on the task of producing a jazz record for Thirsty Ear, that the result still sounds like quintessential Meat Beat. While jazz sampling and experimentation are nothing new to the Meat Beat catalog, this is the first record in a long and noteworthy career that is explicitly anchored more in the jazz tradition than in the world of club music, hip hop, and dub. I should note that I don't listen to much jazz: I know what I like and numerous attempts to get into jazz have just left me to conclude that the genre as a whole is not really my cup of tea. However, a record like At The Center exists to change that. Thirsty Ear has been building a catalog that could be described as "jazz for people who don't like jazz" by courting people from the electronic music world and getting them to participate in 'The Blue Series.' Records from DJ Spooky, DJ Wally, Spring Heel Jack and others have all found their way into my record collection as ambassadors to a sound and style and tradition that I don't usually embrace. Of the Blue Series records I've heard, At The Center is perhaps the one that manages to keep the most of its creator's original identity in place while staying faithful to the intention of the project. This record is comprised of wiggly flute and clarinet pieces, upright bass, shuffling drum beats, playful stabs of piano, and odd samples--the usual. The sounds themselves aren't particularly new for a Meat Beat release, but they are cleaner and less processed than usual, giving the record much more of an improvised and live feel. Only one track is longer than six minutes, and that's perhaps the greatest success for this record: that it manages to explore and stretch without getting self-indulgent the way some jazz does. That's not to say the record is made up completely of gems. There are two tracks with an extended recording of someone reading quirky want ads in a strange voice, and while the tracks were funny the first or second time I heard them, they drag on after many more listens. However, astute listeners will hear some faint recycling of jazz touches and melodic phrases from older Meat Beat records worked into the fray and that kind of self-sampling even when the instruments are being played live is so necessarily Meat Beat Manifesto that the record ultimately breezes past any low points. At The Center makes genre and style irrelevant to the equation of enjoying music, and that's what it's all about in the end. Like many other talented multi-instrumentalists and composers, the result of the work is less about songs that fulfill a stylistic promise and more about their creator's will imposing itself regardless of the format, rules, or expectations. That Dangers is backed by a talented gang of players only makes the disc that much more of a success. - Matthew Jeanes, Brainwashed

Meat Beat Manifesto main man Jack Dangers has made a career out of continually being at the forefront of electronic music. From his early industrial-tinged material with then-collaborator Johnny Stevens, to explorations of trip-hop, house, jungle, dub, and beyond, Dangers has never remained in one place for too long. At the Center, his first full length of all-new material since 2002's RUOK?, continues the evolution by combining his signature break-beats and samples with jazz provided by flutist Peter Gordon, drummer Dave King, and keyboardist Craig Taborn. From start to finish, At the Center covers a wide range of moods. The disc begins with "Wild", a slow, slinking number that builds layers of breaking beats, flute, and organ. It slides almost seamlessly into "Flute Thang", which lives up to its name with extensive flute soloing over piano arpeggios and short guitar bursts. "Bohemian Grove" has a middle-eastern flair, with prominent sitar over string swells, while, "United Nations Etc. Etc" evokes Daft Punk with a muffled, bouncy bass line and twisting keyboard noodling. Finally, the disc's closer, "Granulation 1", is a creepy combination of haunting background surges and off-kilter piano, leaving the listener quite a distance from where he or she began. The album ambles on in an almost hypnotic fashion, sidling from track to track, switching between purely instrumental tracks and ambient soundscapes with vocal samples. Two such tracks, "Want Ads One" and "Want Ads Two", feature a comical voice-over reading want ads from a newspaper over atmospheric noise. The combination of styles creates balance, and it keeps the listener from getting too comfortable with the disc as a whole. The bulk of the album is jazz-fused, however, and the musicians play off of each other superbly, never stealing the spotlight, but never coming off as tacked on either. For this record, at least, Meat Beat Manifesto sounds as much like a band as a single musician, something Dangers has never really done before. The real strength of At the Center is just how contemporary it sounds. Dangers never succumbs to the temptation to phone it in, and he never relegates himself to simply giving in and playing generic pop music. For an artist to consistently push the envelope for over 15 years is a marvel, yet Meat Beat Manifesto can easily stand shoulder to shoulder with the current round of lap-top composers, most of whom are building off of his work in the first place. -Cory D. Byrom, Pitchfork

Jack Dangers has increased his musical output in recent years, spitting out a string of records under his own name, Meat Beat Manifesto, and Tino Corp, pushing his style into heretofore unheard directions. With Loundness Clarifies, Dangers essentially bridges the gap between the comfortable, groove-oriented material that everyone associates with Meat Beat Manifesto, and his more experimental, offbeat tendencies when working without the expectations of the "Meat Beat brand." Of course, Meat Beat records have always had a touch of the obscure and absurd in them, but after listening to the last few albums and comparing them to the early work, some of the daring experimentation seemed to be missing in favor of tighter grooves. Here, Dangers seems to be going for the logical connection between the grooves and beats for which he is so well known, and the studio antics and manipulation of sound that is close to his heart. Loudness Clarifies plays more with distortion and strange frequencies than anything heard from Jack in a long time. The beats are crunchy electro wiggles, breaks-overdriven and run along with a warbly bass that at times consumes them. Dangers' typical analog synth fascination is in full effect, but the tones are all slightly detuned, bent, filtered, or otherwise molested into something a bit darker and less accessible than might be expected. This is not to say that the record is a full-on excursion into DSP-noodle-land. In fact, far from it, the album sounds more akin to the kind of records Dangers was making over a decade ago as it's full of the warm hum of tubes and transistors and tapeloops whizzing by. Not Breathing's Dave Wright plays the flange on the opening track (the first time I've ever seen flange credited as a performance) and bass on another, while The Bass Kittens' Jon Drukman has a go with some crispy fried electro rhythms on "Super Hit 9" that give the album some of its best and weirdest moments. As if a new and style-stretching release from Dangers wasn't enough, the package also includes some of Dangers' electro-acoustic and found-sound collage work entitled Electronic Music From Tapelab. Fans of Dangers' work won't be surprised by the weird, disembodied voices and radio static and analog squiggles that poke out from the speakers in this collection of ten studio tracks recorded for film, radio, and television, but they may not be overwhelmed by the disc either. As music concrÍte records go, it is an impeccible studio effort and showcases Dangers' uncanny use of space and ability to isolate the best parts of sounds. However, as music written for film, radio, and TV, it tends to lack a narrative center that might be provided by visuals or some other accompanying context. Take the audio accompaniment and sound design out of its narrative environment, and it tends to be hit or miss based on the quality of the sounds alone. This is, of course, the point of such a record, but like looking through the portfolio of your favorite designer, there are going to be pieces that grab you, moments that speak to you, and others that are easily skipped. Electronic Music From Tapelab is a fun sound design experience, but I'm not liable to spin it as frequently as its more structured, song-based younger brother. Important packages both discs in a nice cardboard double pack, and taken as a whole, it's impossible not to like. - Matthew Jeanes, Brainwashed

What Steve Reich and John Cage did with electronics and musique concrète in the 20th century, Jack Dangers is deftly handling in the 21st. Loudness Clarifies/Electronic Music From Tapelab is his sophomore double-set for ¡mportant!, featuring guests David Wright (Code Indigo, Callisto) and Jon Drukman (Bass Kittens, The Ultraviolet Catastrophe). Dangers gets dancey first with Meat Beat Manifesto-esque boombity-boom beats-and-breaks on disc one, and electro-noodly on the next, with nifty goodies from his Marin Tapelab studio. His hero is the ultra-rare (as in one left) 600-lb. EMS Synthi 100 and its awesome bloops and bleeps. Dangers' dual sounds endure masterfully! - Stacy Meyn, XLR8R

Jack Dangers of the impossibly influential electronic act Meat Beat Manifesto strips away the drum machines and samplers, leaving only his impressive vintage synthesizer to produce this live ambient work, played to accompany a screening of the classic sci-fi film Forbidden Planet. It's not the most novel idea. Electronic artists have long reached towards the cinema to give their music a more complete existence. Techno icon Jeff Mills went so far as to produce a soundtrack for the Fritz Lange silent masterpiece Metropolis, and proceeded to screen it around the world. What's interesting about Dangers' attempt is that he performed all of the music live, as well as generated sound effects which are included on the second disc. Also interesting is the fact that Forbidden Planet is not a silent film and therefore had a soundtrack of its own long before Dangers took the controls. But no matter. As a study in oscillator-produced texture and sound, few have the capabilities of Dangers to make his robust electronic machines feel utterly weightless. Like a 100 ton supercomputer, floating away in the zero gravity of space. - Joshua Glazer, All Music Guide

Why would Meat Beat Manifesto's mastermind mess with Louis and Bebe Barron's untouchable 1956 soundtrack to Forbidden Planet, an ur-document of malevolent, spacey woobs, gurgles and twitters? Because Jack has the world's only functioning EMS Synthi 100, and, damn it, he's gonna use it. This recording, live from France's I.D.E.A.L. Festival, proves that Dangers is well-suited to subtly modify and capture the questing spirit of the Barrons' original (see "Battle With Invisible Monster" for proof). Disc two contains 50 snippets of sci-fi sound effects-dozens of vintage analog-synth emissions ripe for producers seeking instant threatening atmospheres and otherworldly textures. - Dave Segal, XLR8R

"In Vital Weekly 433 I noticed that in the early pioneering days of electronic music, the late fifties, the relationship between electronic music and space became clear. Kid Baltan's 'Song Of The Second Moon' didn't deal with Yuri Gagarin (an error on this historian's side), but it delt with the launch of the sputnik. Kid Baltan was later also asked to compose the soundtrack for '2001 - A Space Oddysee', which he refused. At the same time Louis & Bebe Barron composed their purely electronic soundtrack to the film 'Forbidden Planet', which now gets a re-interpretation by Jack Dangers, aka Meat Beat Manifesto. Entirely composed on a Synthi 100 synthesizer (I believe that's an EMS one), he performed this at the 'I.D.E.A.L.' festival in Nantes during a screening of the film. Dangers stays close the original ideas of electronic music for sci-fi films, with a chilly sound, alien (pun intended) bleeps and glissando waves. I must admit, entirely my mistake, that I never saw the film, only heard the original soundtrack, and I think Dangers does a very fine job, staying that close to the original, yet keeping his own voice in this. And to make the fun complete, a second CD contains 'sci-fi sound effects', fifthy in total, so all you home astronauts can compose your own soundtracks to real or imaginairy films. I know I would..." - (FdW), Vital Weekly

"In what was actually performed live as part of the Ideal Festival in France, Jack Dangers (aka Meat Beat Manifesto) played live during a screening of the classic 1956 MGM cult film Forbidden Planet starring Leslie Nielsen and Anne Francis. These ethereal sound effects are captured in twenty-three thematic tracks that illustrate the quirky film, and at the same time give it a fully timeless quality. Dangers channels the era by creating sounds that are otherwise from a bygone time and space, but by retrofitting them to a time capsule that is nearly 50 years old, has refashioned our conscious thinking about how sound is perceived before, during and after. Watery crescents delight with the soul of an analogue-based futuristic technology, leaving the audience with a wide span of trans-space that competes with the vortex of the unknown on tracks like “Love at the Swimming Hole.” The track meanders as the mortals tie their love knots. Complete with some of the most classic sound effects that you may find in films that present radars at great depths and other cool signaling devices, Dangers unveils a secret passion for the sci-fi side of his psyche on tracks like “The Mind Booster – Creation of Matter.” Here there are hints of what has appeared in latter day MBM material. The way the material is delivered is in the classical tradition of live jams being played during a silent film, a practice that is limited today, but in this case completely penetrating. However, I am not exactly sure how it works with a talkie. This provides a brain-shorting exercise, launching you into an altered state for its duration. As if that were not enough, we are treated to an additional bonus disc of Sci Fi Sound Effects that Dangers concocted on his, and the world’s only known operational, EMS Synthi 100. This room-sized equipment delivers a full-force sci-fi montage of chilling to overtly eerie sounds. It’s a great collection of short, strange, chaotic and neutralizing tones. With all of the tracks running at under a minute and a half Dangers develops audio geometries in sound bytes here. Space transducers, laser guns, audio warfare, oh my! " - TJ Norris, Igloo

The master of spacey dub tracks compiles a whole album of them! There's something intensely satisfying about an artist who always delivers the expected with a high level of quality. It's like having a favorite meal and a favorite restaurant and knowing that every time you go, the experience will be slightly different, you will bring your own, different perspective each time, but there will always be something comfortable and familiar. By now, Meat Beat Manifesto are fine purveyors of musical comfort food. There are no brash surprises or about faces on In Dub, which is part dub/remix record based on RUOK and part experiment with bong hit delays and rubbery bass. The elements of a classic Meat Beat record are all here, from the meticulously constructed beats to the rolling basslines to the spacious ambience that creates a space so unique that even the moments without beats are signature Meat Beat moments. For crate-diggers, sample jockeys and other boys and girls with samplers trying to unearth the wittiest, weirdest bits of sound ever to be recontexturalized into booty-moving tunes, Jack Dangers has once again beat everyone to the punch. The extended sample of an engineer explaining a missle guidance system hands down eclipses my previous favorite samples that are all, appropriately enough, from other Meat Beat records. While In Dub takes a more particular look at the Meat Beat sound through the dub microscope, there's always been a hefty dose of expected rattling high hats and percussion ringing out into space so this doesn't sound significantly different than most other Meat Beat records. It has a more narrow scope than albums like Subliminal Sandwich and Actual Sounds and Voices, but it nails just about every track in a that has come to be expected. - Matthew Jeanes, Brainwashed

[continued from above] The real revelation with In Dub comes with the 5.1 surround sound mix found on the DVD. I've always been amazed at the deft placement of sounds in Meat Beat Manifesto mixes, and with the extra channels of sound, the whole affair becomes an opportunity for Dangers to show off. There is no one better at sculpting sound into an immersive, breathing, pulsing atmosphere while maintaing head nodding rhythms and a sense of humor than Jack Dangers, and In Dub demonstrates that. For those hoping that the DVD edition of In Dub will contain full-on videos for the album's tracks, I would stress that the visual accompaniment provided by Ben Stokes is more along the lines of highly stylized visualizations than music videos proper. Some tracks feature pulsing graphics not unlike a quirky WinAmp viz, while others have a slightly more developed video presentation, but all in all the visual side of the DVD is more of a special feature than a main attraction. The reason to get the DVD is the 5.1 mix, something that will become more and more common, but may not be done much better than it is here. In Dub won't likely change anyone's perception of what Meat Beat Manifesto is at this point, but it's a welcome new release from an old standard that continues to refine, innovate, and satisfy. - Matthew Jeanes, Brainwashed

After one of his more negligible dance tracks became the ass-kicking, bullet-dodging anthem of The Matrix, just what the hell was Jack Dangers supposed to do? Refashion his own myth, apparently. On his seventh Meat Beat Manifesto album, R.U.O.K? , Dangers dumps the cramped, sample-heavy confines of his last three albums, including his commercial-friendly 1998 Actual Sounds + Voices, for a visceral feel as immediate and confrontational as his first gritty post-industrial recordings some 13 years ago. Which is not to say the samples are gone so much as they're pushed around, bullied into second-class status by Dangers' renewed awareness of sonic depth. The Meat Beat Manifesto classics "God O.D." and "10X Faster Than the Speed of Love" were built around basic dub principles like a murderously deep bass line that rolls like a slammed Cadillac and lots of airy space peppered with percussion sounds, and it's these elements that define every track on R.U.O.K? The most eerily cool thing about "Spinning Round" isn't the quiet whirling talisman sound Dangers has used before, but the intangible silence between the bass and a very lonely tambourine. Even "What Does It All Mean," featuring copious amounts of turntablist du jour Z-Trip's freestyle scratching, takes on an earthier live hip-hop immediacy thanks to Dangers' restrained use of synths and layered breakbeats. And there's Dangers' collaboration with The Orb's Alex Paterson, "Horn of Jerico," a hypnotic funk excursion track every bit as psychedelic as anything either of them have released separately. Aside from "Spinning Round," little on R.U.O.K? possesses commercial cache, but what is that against a career-defining turn? - Heath K. Hignight, Urb

When electronica was supposed to break big, it was en vougue to namecheck the Meat Beat sound as a cornerstone of the big beat electronic party music that took over the media consciousness for a while, and later became the soundtrack for selling cars and toothpaste. But when Meat Beat's newest full-length, 'RUOK' was released, it came as a surprise to many in these parts. "Oh, you mean he's still doing stuff?" Yeah. He is. And if 'RUOK' is any indication, those of us tired of the sample-laden soundtracks designed to sell SUVs should be thankful. Without pandering to the micro-genre trends of recent, critically accepted electronic music, Meat Beat Manifesto has managed to crank out another record that is equal parts deep sound collage, bombastic beats and rolling basslines, and unabashed fun. But that's not to say that 'RUOK' isn't without its disappointments. For starters, Dangers has left the vocalizing to the samples here, stripping the Meat Beat sound of most of its political and conceptual weight. There was a time when an angrier Jack Dangers ran channel after channel of feedback into a track armed with ambiguous half-rap, half-shouting. Vocals harmonized into the sublime on tracks like "She's Unreal" from 'Subliminal Sandwich,' but they've been abandoned here. Instead, the vocal hooks come from the next most likely place for a Meat Beat record, the sampled voices used to introduce a beat or define a chorus as in the anthemic "Supersoul," and the cheeky interludes such as a sampled lesson on jive lingo with just enough interruption to make it fun. Then there's the case of two tracks that don't at all seem to fit in the Meat Beat Manifesto repertoire. The album opener, "Yuri" is all analogue bubble and synthetic percussion not unlike the sound of a DHS record, and its partner, "No Echo In Space" offers the same synthetic, technoid rhythm that trades in the James Brown funk for Kraftwerk minimalism. However, the album quickly picks up with the more recognizable Meat Beat sound with "Dynamite Fresh", a "Dogstarman" redux if ever there was one. Dangers cranks up the tempo and feeds the beat with a quick dub bass and spattering of noodly synth notes that fill up every inch of space. We haven't heard a jam like this since '99%' and yet, with all its ferocity, it demonstrates a level of refinement that most funky break music never even imagines. Meat Beat Manifesto has always offered a little more than could be easily digested, from the art/sound collage of 'Armed Audio Warfare' to the simultaneously funky and pissed off sound of "Nuclear Bomb", and 'RUOK' is thankfully no different. It challenges preconceived notions of what a Meat Beat record should sound like while also playing into expectations by recycling samples from Meat Beat records of the past in the ultimate of sonic inside jokes. There are as many ways to listen to these songs as there are sounds to be uncovered, and with the excellent bonus 3" CD included with the album's initial pressing, this should be enough to listen to and think about for quite a while. - Matthew Jeanes, Brainwashed

Variaciones Espectrales is Meat Beat Manifesto's Jack Dangers' contribution to the Series 7 collection. Per the rules of the series, the album contains seven songs recorded over the course of seven days. Neither the brevity of the album nor the time constraints of the recording process have held back Dangers' trademark studio wizardry. These seven songs are a fine addition to his storied discography. If the tracks are a bit more ambient and less fleshed-out than a formal Meat Beat Manifesto release, it doesn't keep Dangers from storming the studio left and right. Electro beeps and blips, freaky hip-hop shuffles, sci-fi sound samples, distorted, skittery beats, and bizarre breakbeats blend in the same effortless fashion as those on a Meat Beat Manifesto album. If things seem more elemental here, with fewer voice samples employed and a more chaotic feel than Actual Sounds and Voices, the music only becomes more primal, immediate, and effective in this setting. Much of Variaciones Espectrales suggests what a Luke Vibert album would sound like if Vibert dropped the cheese factor and researched the term organic. "Zxero" and "3:00 Min," in particular, suggest that Dangers is fully aware of the artists who've aped his style, and it's abundantly clear that he's one step ahead as he incorporates their innovations and derivations into his own workbook. The two songs easily see Dangers outpacing Vibert and Tom Jenkinson, his followers, as he mixes weird future dub with jazz intonations. Though Variaciones Espectrales might be too noisy to work as background music for some listeners and too experimental for the dancefloor, it's another accomplished, fascinating slice of sound/beats exploration from this consistently pioneering artist. - by Tim DiGravina, All Music Guide

Jack Dangers, musician and programmer behind the immensely influential Meat Beat Manifesto, has created a captivating and moody cauldron of sound on Variaciones Espectrales. Its signature is Dangers's remarkable knack for mixing unlikely sonic components into a beguiling whole. "No Secrets No Surprises" and "Zxero" feature busy drums, robotic bass lines, bold synthesizer whoops, and arcane sound fragments, while the syncopated drum patterns on "Short Heavies" make it unpredictable and eerie. "3:00 min" is another intriguing combination of sonic elements, including subdued vocals, saxophones, and the jazzy drum sounds that have always characterized Meat Beat Manifesto's "live" feel. The album is also rich in atmosphere. "Nano" and the aptly titled "Echo in Space" are airy and mesmerizing, yet riddled with raunchy percussion. In all, Dangers mangles the disc brilliantly with insouciant sound effects and intense processing. - Mark McCleerey

Meat Beat Manifesto represent everything that is right about electronic music. Perhaps it's their signature acoustic drum patterns that maintain their songs' timelessness. Perhaps it is leader Jack Dangers's ability to infuse each album with a variety of influences. With Actual Sounds and Voices, Dangers builds his songs around two jazz greats improvising in a recorded session. But the jazz influence never overpowers Meat Beat's bombastic vibe--it only enhances it. Considering their track record, it seems nearly impossible that Meat Beat Manifesto could top themselves. But records are made to be broken. CDs, however, and particularly this one, are meant to be played--over and over and over again. - Beth Bessmer

Entirely too much coffee running through my veins. The shakes are upon me, I can't focus. My fingers are rubbing together, I can feel the skin sloughing silently off, into my keyboard. I need to sleep soon, but the jitters have overtaken me. My ears are burning. Gotta reach out... find something to drive me into a mindless oblivion... a zen place alight with the fiery dance of aggressive energy. Meat Beat is there for me again... oh, my precious Meat Beat. You never fail me. Oh. Jack Dangers and company can always be relied upon for their special brand of heavy- bass grunching, hard- beat industrio-tek to help one get through moments such as these. With the menacing bass lines buried under schizophrenic drums, and bizarre samples emerging from the thickness, this music is meant for the black rooms. White strobes, glassy stares-- Meat Beat Manifesto is not merely heard, but felt deep in the intestines. Where Danger's 1996 epic Subliminal Sandwich spent far more time and energy on cross- genre doodling and experimentation, Actual Sounds and Voices grounds itself sturdily in primal rhythmic themes. Clearly intended for fans of the beat with an eye toward hard trance, the record emerges from a series of studio sessions which were later sampled and reshaped into this final product. Texture ranges from relatively low- key avant- jazzy on tracks like "The Thumb" to pure electro beat on "Three Floors Above You." Directions: open up your head, pour in the stimulants, plug your medulla oblongata into the album. Allow the pulse to control thy heartbeat. Do not be afraid. Let your ego go. Tease the fear, love the fear, Meat Beat will become your fear. Yeh. -James P. Wisdom, Pitchfork

Once upon a time, back when I loved the Power Station, I thought remixes were bullshit. Part of me still does, feeling a secret sting whenever I dole out my ill- gotten gains for six versions of the same track. Perhaps it was just the burritos, but why? Why remix? Well, my friends, it's taken some time and a number of galactically horrendous remixes, but the evoloution of the class has brought us to the glorious day that is today. In my twisted little world, I think of remixes as an opportunity to hear some fatty-phresh DJs rip up somebody's sound and put it back together again with shiny silver duct tape. Ohh... duct tape. Imagine my delight-- my pure oozing honeylike happiness-- when I heard I could write a review for a remix of Acid Again, what I already considered the most compelling track off Meat Beat Manifesto's most recent album Actual Sounds and Voices. You bet I was excited! Why, my penis shrank inside of my body for three days! I broke out in hives, all of my body hair (and you can bet there was plenty) fell out, and my flatulence filled the entire ward! Fortunately the nurses could bring my 1984 Wang Office Assistant in so's I could write this review! Speaking of this review, I'm gonna tell you who I think might like the remixes, and who probably won't. First of all, it's best if you're into hard industrial/ jungle. Previous exposure to Meat Beat Manifesto or perhaps Nine Inch Nails' Fixed and Further Down The Spiral is a plus, and the ability to lose yourself in some truly agressive beats is required. People who require "lyrics" need not apply, though Acid Again has voices, usually saying disturbing things. I like disturbing things, like my bedpan. It's disturbing my nose right now. The three remixers that have gotten their greasy little pinkies on "Acid Again" produce distinctly different tracks that all lean toward hard n' heavy (just like I like my women). I personally like the Freddy Fresh Mix, but hey, that's me. Who the hell is Freddy Fresh, you ask? I don't fuckin' know! Who the hell do you think I am, a music journalist? I think I got the wrong medication. Ak! -James P. Wisdom, Pitchfork

Okay, I was turned off at first because hey, who are they to go telling me how to beat meat? I mean, Karl Marx was bad enough with that Communist thing. I know what to do. Don't need no Manifesto ter tell me. Then I listened to it. Remixes. You know what that means, right? Weak-ass, thinned-out songs. No. Original Fire gave my head and eardrums a solid sledgehammering with unceasing electro/industrial beat for 60 minutes without any loss of interest or kneejerk rejection reaction. Several times I looked down to see my foot tapping. I even thought a few times: "That's a damn good beat, never heard that before." Voices are pure background (if you can't hack Josh Wink's "Are You There?", forget it). It's repetitive and heavy and god only knows why, but I like it. -James P. Wisdom, Pitchfork