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Archenemy
The opening track "Space Song" begins and ends with jagged shards ofsound with a solid wall of noise in between, and that combination ofsharp and thick continues throughout most of the album. Lurking underall the bass and distortion are some pretty sharp hooks that punchthrough and grab you when you're not looking.
Samples are woven in ("Happy the Clown" features a sitcom laugh track)to create a surprisingly coherent collage, not unlike much of thealbum's artwork, and a snatch of Duran Duran is welded onto the end of"Floordrop Opera."
Kudos to Archenemy for getting their grubby mitts on this material andthrowing it out into the world; it's full of varied and solid nuggetswell worth saving.
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Strange Attractors
"Manifest Harmony" in particular feels like a ritualistic incantation with circling and heavily patterned music and vocals. It's easy to imagine vocalist Mark Dwinell performing shamanic rites in the empty desert landscape shown in the album's artwork. Throughout the album Dwinell's almost-chanted lyrics are invocations atop the layers of chunky guitars. Many tracks sound like an arcane ceremony overheard through an open window. But the music isn't at all quiet and hymnal; this ain't Enya. The electric guitars continually make themselves known and they open "It's What I Need" with a snarl.
The album is laced witha distinct Eastern influence, though there aren't any actual sitars,the guitars effectively mimic their delicate sound. Ringing chimes in"Flood" reinforce the east-meets-west feeling.
The album feels so methodic and deliberate, that I was surprised to learnthat Bright generally improvise in the studio. But that also adds tothe overall spiritual feeling...instead of improvising, it feels morelike Bright was channeling.
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Nonplace
The Germanduo's secret rhythms expertly skirt the boundaries of genre andstyle—jazz, dub, funk, African, acoustic, electric, etc,...—andstubbornlyrefuse to commit to any single one. Liebezeit provides the acousticbeat backbone, his drumming stark and seemingly simplistic and, asalways, easy to identify. Friedman, also a drummer among other things(he's usually credited simply with 'other instruments'), supplies thedigital marrow and his signature attention-to-detail production tobring it all together and make it all shine.
Although it's no doubt afully collaborative and probably improvisational effort, Liebezeit isfirmly entrenched in Friedman's hard drive driven atmosphere andgroove. A handful of additional players from around the world fleshthings out with clarinet, melodica, vibraphone, bass guitar andacoustic and electric guitars. These tracks don't stand still butthey're in no hurry to get anywhere in particular either: the music isdeceptively lazy in it's fluidity and thoroughly addictive in due time.
The first three of the eight tracks were born elsewhere prior but herethey re-appear in new versions. The opener "Sikkerhed" surprises withbrash acoustic guitar strums and windwood melodies akin to thesorrowful horns of Burt Bacharach. "The Sticks" and "Mikrokasper"gracefully funk through micro sounds and, in the former, bass/beatinterplay and touches of guitar. "The Librarian" is the lone vocaltrack and is more sparse here than on last year's intriguing NineHorses (David Sylvian / Steve Jansen / Burnt Friedman) album, Snow BorneSorrow. Sylvian's inimitable vocals are much to the fore, yetbefitting of the vibraphone laced beats and vice versa. He longinglytalk-sings "oh my pretty, oh my sweet girl, it's a marvelous place /she designed it with escape routes for you and me / so to the librarywith a new card, grab your favorite books / look for blueprints to thestrains of our love." Lovely guitar harmonics and occasional chordshighlight "Niedrige Decken" while bell tones accentuate the utterlyhypnotic heart beat of "Fearer". The closer "Caracoles" (Spanish for"snails") builds nicely before lapsing into strains of melodica andmarimba.
Secret Rhythms 2 is addictive, and the more I listen, themore I want to listen to it, its predecessors and its hopefulsuccessors.
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(self released)
Themusic of Mwvm drifts out on the outer surface of song and orbitsthrough the trails and pulls of larger musical institutions. Throughfreezing cold deep space “Relayed in Stars” trembles like the mile backdetritus of the Nostromo as a shower of rock cuts through waveringeffects. The sliding drones and restrained strum drifts could beslivers from a Ry Cooder soundtrack.
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Hush
Singer/songwriter Ben Barnett produces spare, emotionalpop/rock, and Kind of Like Spitting is what every high school emo bandthinks they are. The music goes from simple, quiet country-tinged folk to raging guitarsthat nearly overwhelm Barnett's plaintive and charmingly-out-of-tunevocals. The often-poetic lyrics speak of sadness, hope, love, anddeath.
Barnett repeats a handful of lines in three songs—"Hook," Hoax," and "Cater"—but eachtime there's a different spin. They make up the complete lyrics of"Hook" and "Hoax," the spin there given by the titles; the line "You socomplete, so much cooler than me" takes on a new light when considering the song title.The closing track, a cover of Billy Bragg's "Little Time Bomb" fitswell with the band's sound and meshes easily with the rest of the album.
The overriding feeling throughout $100 Room is one ofsomeone trying to find his way through a sometimes desolate world, butstill he's finding it. A statement from the liner notes sums it up forme: "Live long. Love as much as you can."
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Artficial Music Machine
The concept behind this album is straightforward: Merzbow rearrangesTamarin material into new songs and Tamarin does the same with Merzbow.Like a lot of Merzbow’s current output, this album is based more aroundbeats than an all out assault on the ears. I don’t have a problem withAkita’s forays into beats but he’s done it better before (the recentalbum Merzbuta being possibly the peak of this particular direction). The opening track “Processed 3” starts off with a good beat and some nice noises that sound like digitised cicadas. That’s about as interesting as it gets.
Merzbow should be wearing the listener down but I felt the music was being worn down; becoming meek and limp. The tones change on the beat slowly over the course of twelve minutes before fuzzing out into all out noise (quelle surprise!). It is a very poor track. The other two Merzbow tracks are equally dull. All three tracks just smack of sheer laziness; there has been absolutely no effort at making any sort of interesting compositions. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Merzbow had a sweatshop somewhere with a hundred people forced to record generic Merzbowisms using various pieces of electronic equipment.
Tamarin’s half of the CD fares much better. It has a lot morecharacter than the Merzbow tracks. “Untitled 1” sounds like a glitchyrecording of solar flares in a wind tunnel. There is a lushness andspacious feeling to the sounds; it was a joy to listen to after theprevious half hour of crap. “Untitled 2” starts off with a menacing andextremely low drone, after a short while it is joined by a niceclarinet, sounding like a lonely sailor in a sea that is about turninto a heaving mass of waves. The build up to this crash iselectrifying. Static slowly erupts like the warning rattle of arattlesnake. The storm never fully arrives, it’s almost like a tantrictempest, the feeling of impending doom is far more exciting than theactual event.
Tamarin has demonstrated a far more skilful approach to remixing Merzbow’s work than Merzbow has managed with Tamarin. Too bad Merzbow Vs. Tamarin wasn’t made into two separate EPs, the last three tracks are really wonderful in their use of sound but the first half of the CD is so disgracefully amateur that it is painful to listen to and not in the usual way.
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Brocoli
It isn't shocking that a French duo would write a song in the English language and have it fail miserably. The music itself isn't particularly vapid in this case, but when reading lyrics that come across like a teenage nightmare, it's difficult to get caught up in a mood or feeling the music might be trying to convey. I think I might want to dance to this song, but knowing that the lyrics have something to do with having just one ball is... disappointing. The whole song ends up feeling cheap; it would've sounded better without the robotic lyrics, anyways. Yet listening to the opening "Y A-t-il de L'eau Sur Mars?" I get a completely different sense of who this band is and what they do. The quietly pulsing, delicate arrangement of electronic carbonation on this song is exciting, a quick buzz of catchy rhythms and unusual collage. But it's an outright lie because nothing else on Music for Girls sounds anything like it. Only "En Forêt" comes close to reproducing the anxiety of the melodies and rhythms on the opening track. Unsurprisingly, both songs are listed as being based on samples from songs by other people. Minizza work very well when they're given an already interesting set of sounds to work with, but when it comes to doing their own thing, they fail most of the time.
Ka-Spel's presence on "Globally Yours" is enticing, his voice well suited for the rolling percussion and synthetic melodies that litter the song in stabs and gasps. Peter Hook's bass must've been stolen and used for the recording of this song, however, because it's oh so obvious that his particularly stoic manner of playing laid the groundwork for the track's central melody. The rest of the album is an amalgam of styles and French vocal performance, none of which are especially attractive nor catchy. Despite the use of saxophones, flutes, and strings, none of the songs on Music for Girls is exotic or unique. In an attempt to cover a lot of ground stylistically, the band failed to write anything more than two songs worth of melodies worth keeping in the old memory banks. Even the silly and somehow sexually disturbing "Monoball" outclasses most of the second half of the record.
Add the fact that many of these songs don't sound like they even belong on the same album and the end result is a disappointing record that began with a lot of promise. Trying to smash all these massively different songs together on the same album makes much of the music seem lame and forced. The lazy and sensual "Je Suis Mort" is a pretty song, but it sounds like it belongs to the romantic world of France as envisioned by tourists from America during the 60s, not to the shape and sound of the rest of the record. Since none of the songs really sound like they belong together, this sense of discontinuity keeps the record from ever really grabbing hold of me. The exceptions are the three more abstract songs the occupy the beginning and end of the record. The final song on the album, "Juste Avant l'Orage," sounds like a cramped and drug fueled vision of all the most possessive and aggravated aspects of every relationship ever suffocated out of existence by paranoia and violence. As such, it's an impressive and maniacal song that doesn't belong anywhere on an album otherwise filled with failed pop songs and sickeningly sweet imitations of French music from twenty or so years ago.
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Mush
While achieving biblical-status in the canons of underground rap, Funcrusheressentially funded the rise of backpacker-mecca Rawkus Records.That's hard to follow. Bigg Jus has got the name and the pedigree, butit's high time to get his name back in the spotlight, and Poor People's Day is nothing if not ambitious.
To call it planned would be conspiracy-baiting of the most ludicrousorder, but Jus couldn't have timed the release better: after thedebacle in New Orleans, the plight of the poor and disenfranchised(read: black) is a most relevant topic, on the minds of talking headson TV and would-be revolutionaries on the street. A semi-conceptalbum, all thirteen tracks are "for" the huddled masses—whether it'sJus decrying the military-industrial complex in metaphor or ruminatingon the burdens of being black—and downtrodden in America, cursingthe man and wishing for a better future. The most poignant and searingverses deal with race: "How do I begin this history lesson?/ How do Iteach my seed the government considers him opposition/... If theyconsider him a threat Lord knows they try to kill him/ But he must knowabout Tuskegee syphilis injections and how scientists turn vaccinesinto bioweapons."
DJ Gman's empty-cupboard orchestration iswell-suited for such heavy words. They're sparse and gritty,evoking images of empty streets in an urban wasteland and dark cloudsover the horizon. While he uses a healthy amount of turntablism—alost concept for some producers—he doesn't sample much. When hedoes use samples, they're used as punctuation: a chorus of chanting voices, somewailing strings or something else approrpriately onimous, eerie ordramatic. They don't steal the show by any means but they're notsupposed to, it's Jus's show and he's got something to say.
There's a reason why Juss is the forgotten member of Co-Flow: he's atalented and imaginative street poet, but his mic delivery is averageat best, so he makes up for it with sheer imagination. Poor People's Dayis full of terrible imagery, of scenes of mayhem and chaos, andpromises of post-apocalyptic chaos. A typical verse sees Jus imagininghimself as an "energy harvester/I sip on molten lava, skin made ofsolar panels/photosynthesis be pumping chlorophyll intravenous throughmy incisors." Such mysterious rhymes paint the picture of Jus not as amegaphone-wielding organizer of the masses, but an empty-eyed dreadeddude, knocking on your door in the middle of the night and splitting,leaving only a note on the porch reading "IT IS TIME."
The complexitymakes Poor People's Day almost impossibly esoteric, andprobably purposefully so. It's a strange irony to have a paean for themasses be so cryptic, and many will be left scratching their heads, buta lucky few will get to enjoy a hyper-political, abstract gem.
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While Berlinette was subtly flavored withreferences to tired, classic trance, techno, and industrial tracks, Thrills seemed at first to lack thetransformative effect that such borrowings underwent on the previousrecord. Subsequent listens taught me toview the record as an experimentation session whose frequent over-stylizations becamethe frills of an attempt to meld the monolithic and minimal sounds of herinfluences with the Bpitch aesthetic embracing rough-edges, the supercool ofGerman techno, and a sense of scatterbrained, urban fusion.
Though it does have some nice processed vocalnoises, “Down” is just too much of the button-pushing, brow-beating minimalelectro for my taste. The vocal refrain,“Break Me Down,” is likewise not complex enough to carry any weight. Of the three remixes on this 12”, the first,from Dinky, a female Chilean DJ is the most successful, stretching the trackinto a nine-minute cool, pulsing atmospheric, politely avoiding the deadeningthree-note, time-keeping phrase of the original as much as possible, or insteadharmonizing it to make the effect less stunted. To the slowed beat, Dinky adds a muted plucked guitar or piano, giving“Down” a needed coastal air that all but completely obscures its original’smood. Italians Drama Society’s mix turns“Down” archetypal cold, chiming electro slow-burner, way too unchanging andpredictable to excite me, until, for about the last minute, when they chop inthe “ahh-ahh” vocal, louder and more stretchy than the original, sounding reallynice. French hip-hop producers FuckAloopbasically recreate the entire track, using mostly a slowed version of thestuttered industrial shuffle of the rhythm track as template, layed over withsome flashy, fried synth noodling and a re-created vocoder version of the vocalwhich, predictably, sounds annoying. Ifthey’d incorporated some faster breaks into the monotonous static rhythm, thistrack may have come out sounding alright, but the goofy synths do not jive wellwith anything, Ellen Allien or not. Honestly,I’m a bit surprised Ellen endorsed these last two mixes, after some good oneson her last two singles.
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Strange Attractors
Brocade is largely instrumental (only "How to be Clean" has anyvocals) and is bathed in analog synthesizers with lots of guitareffects. There's an unmistakable '70s prog rock sound going on and thepure synths on "Music for ThreeSynthesizers" are very '80s sounding to me, but Landing keeps it modernandfresh, without playing like they're simply digging up old rockcorpses. The music is hypnotic, repetitive, and layered, but by nomeans dull or heavy.
Despite the building layers it has a very open andspacious feel, a feel which is reinforced by titles like "Loft" and"Yon," bringing up images of empty skies and vast distances (echoed aswell in the rather barren landscape on the album's cover)."Spiral Arms" is similarly well-named; if you could put a galaxyinto sound, it might just sound like this. The static buzz carried overfrom "Yon" gives way to delicate acoustic guitar and electronic swoopsand blowing winds. "How to be Clean" is a rocker and addsenough movement and energy to the mix to keep this guitar-rock girlhappy.
I found it difficult to listen to Brocade at work; inaddition to the usual cube farm noise and coworker interruptions,Winamp's pauses between tracks made the transitions jarring, mostnotably between "Yon" and "Spiral Arms" and between "Spiral Arms" and"How to be Clean." This is one to listen to at home with a glass ofwine in a darkened room or on a long lonely car trip, and it'scertainly not one for the iPod Shuffle.
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Prefuse 73 follows up his last, guest-filled full length with thisstripped-back instrumental "mini album" dedicated to the rigors oftraveling to promote and perform his music. This is cut up hip hop forthe short attention span set, and should satisfy the folks who criedfoul when he littered his last hip hop record with (gasp) rapping!
Warp
Prefuse 73 is on the leading edge of a new waveof hip hop that's not strictly aiming for commercial success, but isn'tso intentionally obtuse as to escape it either. Scott Herren's productionchops and approach to songwriting make him a prime candidate to besucked into the major, hit-oriented world as a weirder version of theNeptunes, but luckily he's still working on stuff that isn'ttaylor-made for the likes of Nelly and Snoop Dogg to spit over. If hislast record frustrated a lot of folks who preferred his more abstract,instrumental work to his MC-fueled hip hop proper, this record could bethe antidote, or at least a stop gap until the next one.
Herren's career is one that's strangely straddling differentcamps of fans. The indie hip hop crowd has obviously accepted him, butit's okay to like Prefuse in strictly knob-obsessed laptop tweakercircles too, and it seems everyone wants to claim him. But when Ilisten to Security Screenings, I only hear it as a hip hoprecord, something directly related to similar outings from Cut Chemist,DJ Krush, or even DJ Shadow. While Herren's methods for attacking hissound sources are a bit more obvious about their digital constructionthan his DJ peers', he shares a spirit with producers who arrangesampled records a bit more organically. The quick edits and needledrops on obscure records with odd voice-overs are required fare inheady hip hop, and the in-jokes and interludes that tie songs on thealbum together are nearly as essential to the format as turntables andmicrophones.
All of this is probably what makes Prefuse 73's work sosuccessful. It feels genuine and fits squarely in the hip hop aestheticwhile still being adventurous in a scene plagued by stagnation. Itdoesn't ever feel like Herren is just borrowing hip hop cues and lingoto mash up into a post-modern digital soup, rather he's making hip hopin a new way, using some new tricks, but relying mostly on old ones.With all the talk of digital this and Warp records that and with Herrenplaying alongside big names in the techno world, I was expectingsomething a little less rooted and more exploitative. Plenty of peopleare taking and abusing hip hop motifs and throwing them into othergenres for flavor, but Herren seems bent on just making simple hip hoprecords. This is exactly what caused me to wonder why this was such abig deal four years ago, and exactly why I get it now and think thatmaybe Prefuse 73 is just the victim of confused expectations sometimes.
Security Screenings is, in a way, a hold over recorduntil the next full length, and as such, it feels a little b-sideysometimes. Still, it's hard to hold a grudge against tunes like"Matrimonioids" or "Creating Cyclical Headaches," which features Herrenalongside Four Tet, when they so wonderfully combine fuzzy, organicmelodies with taught beat loops. A new full length LP will be out soonenough, but for now, Security Screenings is a nice look intothe process of making hip hop with a new generation of tools. Majorlabels are no doubt listening and co-opting this sound as we speak.
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