We have finally cleared out the backlog of great music and present some new episodes.
Episode 711 features music from The Jesus and Mary Chain, Zola Jesus, Duster, Sangre Nueva, Dialect, The Bug, Cleared, Mount Eerie, Mulatu Astatke & Hoodna Orchestra, Hayden Pedigo, Bistro Boy, and Ibukun Sunday.
Episode 712 has tunes by Mazza Vision, Waveskania, Black Pus, Sam Gendel, Benny Bock, and Hans Kjorstad, Katharina Grosse, Carina Khorkhordina, Tintin Patrone, Billy Roisz, and Stefan Schneider, His Name Is Alive, artificial memory trace, mclusky, Justin Walter, mastroKristo, Başak Günak, and William Basinski.
Episode 713 brings you sounds from Mouse On Mars, Leavs, Lawrence English, Mo Dotti, Wendy Eisenberg, Envy, Ben Lukas Boysen, Cindytalk, Mercury Rev, White Poppy, Anadol & Marie Klock, and Galaxie 500.
Skolavordustigur Street in Reykjavík photo by Jon (your Podcast DJ).
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The actions and arguments of the Recording Industry
Association of America and some of its most powerful
members exemplify a complete and utter disregard and
contempt for the interests and behavior of musicians,
independent record labels, and, most importantly, the
music-buying public. The RIAA seeks to regulate the
behavior of consumers and actors in a free market via
unreasonable means and at their expense, financially
and otherwise. Its claims of supporting "creative
vitality" and "artists' rights" are disengenuous, as
the RIAA represents the corrupt and exclusionary
oligopoly of major record labels, Hollywood film
studios, and corporate entertainment media outlets.
That certain "indie" labels have membership in this
association is not indicative of an RIAA looking out
for their best interests.
The vendetta against hip hop "mix tape" culture,
which includes bullying producers with threats of
legal action, as well as facilitating raids and
arrests of retailers and other actors maintaining the
integrity of this time honored musical tradition and
promotional tool (See: "Untold
Story of Mondo Kim's Raid", The Village Voice, June
16, 2005 )
The RIAA and the aforementioned colluding oligopolists
are enemies of music and of consumer rights, therefore
we at Brainwashed.Com call for the immediate
dismantling of the RIAA.
We call for all recording artists and independent
labels that are currently members of the RIAA to
immediately separate from this group in an act of
protest, hopefully to form a more progressive association that
better represents their interests.
We call on music lovers worldwide not to purchase the
products of major record labels and to ask others to
do the same.
We call on individuals who own stock in the
oligopolists cited above, in mutual funds or
otherwise, to divest immediately and refuse to invest
further.
We call on the United States Congress to halt all ruling on DMCA
until there are more organizations at the table deciding these laws
which apply to the entire music industry.
The undersigned individuals agree with these
statements and stand with Brainwashed.Com in
solidarity against the RIAA.
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I Am Spoonbender is one of a handful of groups in serious danger offalling through the cracks merely because they were unfairly andinaccurately lumped in with the glut of trendy Electroclash groups thatfound brief, faddish popularity in the early 2000s. After the wreckagecleared and everyone came to their senses, it seemed that IAS and a fewother bands only tenuously connected to this scene were effectivelydisposed of in certain critical circles, like the proverbial baby with the bathwater, despite thefact that they significantly preceded the trend and differdrastically in their musical approach and content.
I Am Spoonbender were clearly much more than just another in a legionof vapid fashion clones making derivative, pseudo-nostalgic garbagetarted up with bitchy posturing, but perhaps because of their usage ofsynthesizers, drum machines and their tantalizingly retroactivereferentiality, they were nonetheless linked to Electroclash, much totheir detriment. A few like Ladytron and Adult have managed tosurvive the post-clash diaspora with a modicum artistic integrity intact,which means that there is hope for IAS as well, especially since theSan Francisco band have always had a lot more going on in the ideadepartment than either of the aforementioned two groups.
Their live shows are spectactular multimedia affairs combiningseizure-inducing light shows with sophisticated rear projections andmusic that comes on like the bastard child of Klaus Schulze and Devo,live drums and banks of Numan-esque synths churning out pulsating,mindbendingfrequencies of sound with subtle aesthetic/political programmingseeping in like subliminal propaganda. Their recordings reveallayers of intelligence and complexity with repeated listens. Inshort, IAS are far too smart and thoughtful to be stuck in the samehole with all the other pidgeons. In fact, if I Am Spoonbendercould be said to belong to any particular milieu, I would place themwithin thesmall and perhaps heterogeneous collection of wildly creative SanFrancisco audiovisual artists that also includes Matmos,irr.app.(ext.),and Sagan.
All this sets the stage for Spoonbender 1.1.1, described as the"tele-ambient dream self" of I Am Spoonbender. Where IAS is theplatform for the groups more populist, outwardly directed energies,Spoonbender 1.1.1 seems intended as a willfully esoteric, theoreticalcounterpart. The music is more abstract and freeform than IASproper, longform ambient compositions synchronized with specially chosen visualelements. In the case of Stereo Telepathy Academy, the visual element is director David Cronenberg's rarely-seen early short film Crimes of the Future,a twisted, disturbing bit of Ballardian mindfuck that put the directoron the map as a truly original voice in modern film. Though the album soundtracks an edited-down version of Crimes, it includes all of the voice-over narration from Cronenberg's other early experimental film Stereo, afilm that purports to be the actual video record of a scientific studyconducted for the purpose of exploring experimentalsurgical procedures meant to advance telepathic communication. Throughout the film's silent succession of vignettes, a cold, monotonevoice frequently breaks in to describe the purpose of the study and thefindings, callous and clinical descriptions that are often belied bythe disturbingly emotional and sexual imagery on display. Spoonbender 1.1.1 retain this voice-over narration along withtheir ambient synthesizer excursions, so that the CD might serve asa sort of Pink Floyd/Wizard of Oz hybrid alternate soundtrack to Cronenberg's Crimes, which is thematically linked to Stereo in ways that might not seem obvious were it not for this unorthodox juxtaposition.
Appropriate to the soundtracking of a film that plays on that strainof experimental, transgressive literarature typified by Burroughs andBallard (whose landmark experimental novel Atrocity Exhibitionisconsciously evoked in Cronenberg's films),Spoonbender's technique hereis a variant of the Burroughs/Gysin "thirdmind" technique. Combining two film sources that were never meantto be combined, then bridging the ideological gap with their richlyevocative music, the music preserves the elements of chance andsynchronicity. This effect comesacross splendidly when actually using the CD as a sountrack to theCronenberg film (which is only available as an included extra on theDVD of Cronenberg aberrant racing car b-movie Fast Company, strangely enough), full of zeniths and nadirs that often seem to correspond with the film's strange rhythms.
The music itself, taken on its own terms, is spacious and hypnotic,a gorgeous inner/outer spacescape to rival the most galactic ofkrautrocks, with deliciously ear-massaging sprays of self-reproducinganalog spores. Along with the surreal, detached recountingspseudo-scientific concepts like "psychic dominance" and "sociallyisolated telepathic gestalt" provided by the Stereo narration, Spoonbender 1.1.1 create agloriously suggestive blanket of shape-shifting psychedelic drones,quivering energy fissures and ghostly evocations of hopelessly obscuredtransmissions. I enjoyed it in much the same way I enjoyed DeliaGonzalez and Gavin Russom's Days of Mars and Dopplereffekt's Linear Accelerator,but somehow to my ears Spoonbender 1.1.1 has it even more on theball. Their particular mutant method of birthing spaceborne ambient electronicsis more crystalline in its purity, more specific in its intent, andultimately more powerful in its effect. It is clear that IAS areready to emerge from under the long shadow cast by the unfortunatecritical assocations of their past. No one is going to mistakethis for the new Fischerspooner album.
A collection of previously unreleased early material, Epidose 1showcases 14 heavily textured songs that are impressively strong, andit's not hard to see why they caught the attention of the majors. TheDrops somehow manage to be noisy and catchy, silly and heavy, all atthe same time.
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.
Like label-mates Landing, Bright dish out melodic tracks rooted in '70sprog rock, but with a distinctively modern feel and looks ahead asmuch as it looks to the past. With its heavy repetition and psychedelicfeel, it's also an eight-song spiritual journey.
"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.
Nonplacelabel founder BurntFriedman is one half of Flanger with Uwe Schmidt (Atom Heart, Atom™,Senor Coconut) and Jaki Liebezeit should need no introduction as thelegendary drummerfor Can. Both men are no strangers to collaborations and thisparticular combo is now going on its fourth year of releases and liveshows. This disc unsurprisingly picks up right where the first oneand the in-between Out In the Sticks mini-LP left off.
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.
This is the kind of debut that knocks on the door of Kranky andConstellation only to be carried directly into the pressing plant on asilver platter decorated with rose petals. This six tracker from mwvm(aka Michael Walton) shows a grasp of the ‘isms’ (minimalism, hypnotismand droneism) that’s already beyond the reach of acts with six times asmany members.
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.
Muchof thisrelease is swathed in swirls of ringing guitar which peal out,travelling from fog to foreground. The feedback throb and shadyatmosphere of “Wasted Year” is lifted into the light by a piece ofmajesticglowing guitar playing. “Sold” is made of altogether softer noise andthe rippling six string guitar briefly bursts through the drone andwarm sky background. For an album with cover art of ice blueundergrowth, there are plenty of balmy sonic moments to be immersedinto. Everything flows well except for “Everything Never Changes,”whichmoves on a jarring ring of sound rocked by little ruptures ofdisorientating electronic noise. But eve this soon settles languidlyinto a guitar line.
“Key” closes this collectionwith a high end whine that sounds like raindrops on bells recorded instark electric light. The combination of these moments of bleakness isalways more than balanced out by the hope radiating from the melodieshere. This is setting a high benchmark for a debut.
A rerelease from 2000, $100 Room is awkward, rough, and soundslike a demo recorded on a crappy 4-track in someone's rec room—andit's also beautiful. The cover image echoes the songs inside: roughlyscrawled and amatuerish, but sweetly so.
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."
One of my main criticisms of Merzbow is the lack of quality control. Everything he records seems to be released whether it’s good or bad. The idea of good noise, however, is oxymoronic, but in comparing this release to some of his better works and other more fruitful collaborations, it nearly ends up as a complete dud. Akita’s contribution is nothing but “Merzbow by Numbers” and only some deft work by Tamarin makes this record anything more than bargain bin fodder.
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.
Edward Ka-Spel's appearance on the upbeat and bubbling "Globally Yours" is the cream of the crop as far as this record is concerned. I avoided listening to this record for longest time after reading the puerile lyrics for "Monoball," but after giving it a chance it's now obvious that this release needs memorable tunes more than anything else.
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.
The lost and forgotten member of Company Flow is back with a gritty andsearing if slightly uneven clarion call-out. Long playing the Flav toEl-P's Chuck D, Bigg Jus hit an early peak as one-third of industrylegends Co-Flow. But unlike El-P, Jus has yet to make a solo effortworthy of holding a candle to Funcrusher Plus. 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.
The third single off Thrills,Allien’s most recent full length is actually one of my least favoritetracks from a record that has taken some time to get used to. After Berlinette,the artist’s blissful attempt at incorporating glitch and pop elements into herunique blend of sleek post-electro and handmade futurist techno, Thrills seemed a rather straightforwardattempt at bringing her art back to the dancefloor: it's certainly addictive butfor many a sideways step.
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.