Showing posts with label Electronica. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Electronica. Show all posts

Saturday, August 25, 2007

In Vinyl We Trust

Cobblestone Jazz - DMT
Cobblestone Jazz - Put the Lime in da Coconut
Joel Mull - Begun the End Has (Mathew Jonson Tiger Remix)

If previous years were infested with absolutely killing Mathew Jonson tunes then 2007 is turning into a grand cru year for Cobblestone Jazz. It helps of course when said Jonson is one of the three Jazzers. The single-sided 'DMT' is probably the darkest minimal tune to hit the decks in 2007. Rightout creepy with those muffled voice samples but well worth your money.

Regular 12" 'Put the Lime in the Coconut' combines the best of Jonson's wobbly techno rhythms (think 'Put Your Booty Shorts On') and the trio's jazz-inclined melodies. Don't care too much for the flip, though.

Jonson's Mull remix has been out for some time now but it is surely his best remix ever and one of the best dance tracks of the year. A cosmic delight from beginning to end.

Kelley Polar - Chrysanthemum EP
Henrik Schwarz - Walk Music
Osunlade - Elements Beyond

House is in a state of resurrection after years of slowly bleeding to death. But it is striking how most good house records have taken in a lot of techno influence. Kelley Polar strikes again with a beautiful three-tracker that, apart from the electro foundation, is rife with Age of Aquarius-style disco choirs and achingly beautiful melodies all around. Stunning as usual.

Henrik Schwarz's newest is, I humbly dare to state, without a shadow of a doubt his best yet. A tad more techno than house in a pumped up Basic Channel way and proving that Schwarz is one of the best producers in dance music right now.

The new Osunlade (on Strictly Rhythm of all labels) was a mighty surprise after years of Afro-tinged noodling from the man. There are at least five masterpieces on his new longplayer. This guy understands house (i.e. he knows that techno and house are an eternal twin) and that kind of understanding is growing rarer with the year. Amaze yourself and take a listen.

UR - Electronic Warfare 2.0
UR - Ma Ya Ya

Apart from some mid-nineties posing by Alec Empire Mad Mike's Underground Resistance remains the one and only truly political project in the whole of techno. The second episode of Electronic Warfare, as ever, makes no concessions at all, be it on the sonic or on the ideological side. Knife-sharp analog terror beats go hand in hand with soulful - albeit noisy - Red Planet-style techno. With lyrical snippets like "I'm gonna kill my radio station before it kills me" and "I am / U R / We will / Re-sist" it would be all too easy to point out the militant naivity. But only those who do not realize that every revolution requires an honest dose of naivité would come up with that kind of judgement. Essential as ever and comes with a nifty 7-inch sporting a raucous bonus track and an a capella of standout track 'Kill My Radiostation'. Judge or be judged!

'Ma Ya Ya' is from a few years ago but I only managed to lay my hands on it a few weeks ago. The combination of funky electrobeats, afro chants and accordion is just pure genius. Underground Resistance forever!!!

Q Lazarus / The The - Dark & Lovely 6

More tasty edits from Pilooski, here assisted by Krikor, who comes up with a heartbreaking electro edit of the Q Lazarus track, once part of the original Silence of the Lambs soundtrack. Pilooski himself beefs up The The's 'Giant', a track that was waiting to be reintroduced to the new dance generation.

Marc Ashken - Skream Remixes EP
Skream - Box of Dub
Andy Stott - Fear of Heights EP
Mala - Lean Forward

Dubstep's zenith is far from reached when someone like Skream (a genius that youngster) keeps providing the dope. The two remixes for Marc Ashken, originally minimal techno, are among his darkest tracks ever and they are oozing bass like snails ooze slime. The sample that rightly decries "R&B shit" is an added bonus.

The 12-inch drawn from the Box of Dub compilation on Soul Jazz sees him in straight-out dub mode. One might have doubts when there is only one extra track on this two-tracker, but 'Pass the Red Line' is one of the dubbiest tracks to ever emerge from the movement and certainly essential.

Andy Stott is the guy who cannot choose between techno and dubstep and it should come as no surprise then that the sublime Fear of Heights refrains from crossing the divide and insteads bridges both styles. Melancholic like Detroit techno and meditative like the best of Deep Chord, with, of course, deeeeeep bass.

The new DMZ comes courtesy of Mala who returns to murky dub waters after the techno cross-over of 'Left Leg Out'. 'Lean Forward' is the more dancefloor orientated track with a skanking climax after the Haile Selassie invoking break, while the slower 'Lean' reminds of Loefah's classic 'Mud' . Another topper indeed.

Saturday, July 21, 2007

Son Electronique

2562 - Channel Two

To myself it has always been an immediacy, but hopefully it will, thanks to Appleblim and Shackleton's latest releases, Ewan Pearson opening his latest Fabric mix (sort of) with it and records like this one, become clear to the general techno/dance populace as well: (minimal) techno and dubstep were always made for each other. Take these two razorsharp technodubbers by young Dutch producer 2562 and mix them with off-kilter minimal techno, say of the Villalobos persuasion, and nobody should even notice that you are no longer playing techno. Great divides being closed, if the world at large does not start with it, it may as well be happening in music.

Shackleton feat. Jackson Del Rey - Next to Nothing

Strangely enough I find the usual Shackleton magic not entirely present on this outing for Crosstown Rebels. The techno remixes by both Guillaume and the Coutu Dumonts and Exercise One are for once far superior. They stick to the percussion and the result is two very memorable and funky as hell club stormers. Essential.

Aril Brikha - Ex Machine

Aril Brikha has to be one of the most unlucky producers of all time. He started out with 'Groove la' Chord', without any doubt one of the ten best techno tracks of all time (if not the best). It just could not get better after that. It almost did a few months ago with 'Berghain'. But there is not a single note on Ex Machine that so much as equals the power of the two aforementioned tracks. Everything is incredibly beautifully produced, everything sounds lush and warm. But it leaves me colder than both poles combined. Terrible, is it not?

Cybotron - Clear (Cobblestone Jazz Remix)

This could have been an outrageous sacrilege. But surprisingly it is far from that. It is actually very good with the Cobblestoners doubling the length of the original and adding subtle and non-invasive effects. But it will forever remain anyone's guess why they did not call this 'The Mathew Jonson Mix', because it is overly clear that those are Jonson's settings.

B12 - Slope

Talking about retro. The return of B12 is at the very least quite unexpected. After a silence of almost a decade the duo are back and they deliver. Only three tracks for the time being but 'Slope' itself can be played out by any self-respecting techno dj. The other two tracks are more akin to their previous incarnation, but even there you can hear a definite progression away from their eternal post-Transmat leanings. Awesome and welcome back.

Innersphere - Phunk (Ricardo Villalobos Remix)

Ricardo does one for the floor. It was about time. No self-reflection, darkness or ultra-minimalism this time (mind you, not that I have anything against that), just an original interpretation that will give this classic a second life. Villalobos The New Remix King? Pretty sure.

Friday, July 13, 2007

Thursday, July 12, 2007

It seems I am more and more retreating from the world of 'normal' music these days. One way or another these days I always end up, or listening to a whole lot of unstructured improv and noise assaults, or investigating the merits of this or that modernist composer (Scelsi, Webern, Xenakis). It goes even that far that a lot of my time is spent listening to silence on disc. With 'silence on disc' I mean the kind of music that makes you wonder whether it is your computer humming, the house squeaking or, indeed, the music that you put on that you are hearing at a given moment. Anyway, if less is more, nothing is everything.

None the less I am again amazed at the gullability of the common music scribe to believe that Interpol has anything whatsoever to do with Joy Division. I have never detected a single trace of Joy Division-ness in Interpol and the new album makes that point even clearer. I almost threw up when that overacting singer pointed out to the world that "it's not so bad". Ian Curtis would never have daigned to come up with a silly line like that. For Christ sakes', not only is it that bad, it is even worse. Then again, Our Love to Admire is easily their least irritating record to date, though there is not a single note on it that even comes close to the brilliant 'Evil', the group's only non-irritable sequence of notes.

On another tip: whether it is Richard James or not (I think it is him, though), I think The Tuss is absolutely worth your time.

Thursday, June 28, 2007

Rather Raving (about)

Helmut Lachenmann - Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelholzern

It was bound to happen. After listening to noise, improvisation and free jazz for some time I just needed to submerge myself into modern composition. Do not ask me any musical specifications about this one because I am far from steeped in the finer points of counterpoint, pitch, serialism or twelve-tone theory. But I sure know this is one of the best things I have ever heard. As you can guess from the title this is sort of an opera. There are actually not too much vocals, rather vocalisations and Sprechgesang. I just wish now that I had taken up musical theory when I was younger, because now I can only tell you that I am playing this to death. I think, though, that it, again, has to do something with the recurring silence and the minute gradations of volume in this kind of music. And of course with the fact that Ralf Wehowsky (of P16.d4) once pointed out in an interview that this music sounds right and everything by Madonna sounds wrong.

[It would not be honest to throw that last bit in the reader's face without providing any context, however. What Wehowsky meant was that to listen to pop music you do not need to adapt yourself, because the melodies are for the most part quite simple and harmonically pleasing. Listening to dissonant, unpredictable music requires of your brain that it adapts itself to patterns that it is not used to. Adapting is learning and learning is acquiring more knowledge. Anyway, I think he is right.]

Karl-Heinz Stockhausen - Mikrophonie I & II / Telemusik

Einstürzende Neubauten, but 25 years earlier. These are probably the Stockhausen works that were most ahead of their age. The musical equivalent of stealing the fire from the gods. Amazing.

Cornad Schnitzler - Rot

I knew Schnitzler from his pioneering roles in Kluster and Tangerine Dream, but I had not yet checked out his solo works. So this came on like a revelation. 'Meditation' is a mechanic ambient soundscape much in the vein of Seesselberg or Vangelis's Beaubourg, while 'Krautrock' is the real works: lots of bubbling proto-industrial electronics with an ensnaring percussion loop being segued in later on. Schnitzler's music (and there is an awful lot of it) always sounds a bit like an automatic factory turned into music, so refrain if you are looking for emotional satisfaction. Of course I am exaggerating here, because there are pleasing sweeping synth tones woven through most of 'Krautrock'.

Magma - Mekanik Destruktiw Kommandoh

Mostly when people reference Magma it is to ridicule them for their self-invented Zeuhl language and general hippy antics. But then they better take heat of this. This reminds me of Archie Shepp's Attica Blues and that's saying something. Probably one of the best prog records ever. Shows that these guys were highly knowledgeable of the most interesting periods of black music (Tribe, Strata East, Black Jazz). You have got to take the ridiculously high female chanting for granted, though, otherwise you will not be able to sit this through.

Robert Ashley - Automatic Writing

Robert Ashley now makes experimental opera's but this is something different altogether. The title track consists of no more than two voices, one female whispering in French (think L'Année Dernière à Marienbad, and closer to home Nurse With Wound's 'Echo Poème', which is a total rip-off of Ashley) and one slowed down to a sort of unholy grunt, plus some unidentified background noises.

On 'Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon', when a girl's voice is talking about a guy who puts his fingers between her legs and then tries to put that finger in her mouth (and so on) over the sound of a music box, things get very creepy, as if you are listening to an excerpt from Sex, Lies and Videotape, but without any help of context. 'She Was a Visitor' is no more than that same sentence repeated ad nauseam over particularly uneasy listening.

One of the most powerful and impressive pieces of sound art
you are bound to hear. Ever. Do not play this with the lights out, unless you want to end up in an asylum for the mentally challenged.

Robert Ashley - Private Parts


After Automatic Writing this is almost easy listening, though it is also far from that. Basically it is a guy with a soothing but also slightly bored voice reciting a text of seemingly unrelated text fragments over tablas, piano and delicate synth tones. Alienating to say the least, though less psychologically invasive as Automatic Writing.

Mordant Music - Carrion Squared

Mistah Fisha is going all "hauntological" over this ("Music is dead. Long live hauntology!", LOL), again, although he hastens to set aside this release from the label's usual output. He'd better, because this album was made for library music publisher Boosey & Hawkes* and consists of no less than 40 mini-drones à la Cluster, Conrad Schnitzler or Seesselberg. So no "hauntology" then, but kosmische music, though of course the shortness of the pieces contradict their cosmic nature. All very confusing, but that's "hauntology" for ya, I guess.

Threshold Houseboys Choir - Form Grows Rampant

Being Peter Christopherson's first outing since the demise of John Balance, Coil's other half. This actually sounds like an instrumental version of the new Throbbing Gristle album. That it contains heavy trace elements of the later Coil (and Balance's voice for that matter) will not surprise either. Themes and even melodies of certain Coil records are leisurely reemployed (especially the heavy use of vocoders from post-mortem album The Ape of Naples) and thus this sounds a lot like the slightly perverted fairy-tale music that the duo were famous for in their later carreer. And yes, you are probably right about the homosexual innuendo contained in the project's name, given the fact that Christopherson has been living in Thailand for some while now. Intriguing as ever nonetheless.

Box of Dub

Always nice to notice that dubstep has some margin for progression. The top dogs of the game come up with roots inspired dubstep and show along the way that dubstep is really only at the beginning of its odyssey. Which in this case means going back to the roots of the style and toning down the overall darkness.

Rumble in the Jungle


A supreme compilation that shows after the fact where jungle went wrong. No electronic basses or metallic percussion here, just vocally hyperactive rude boys and superfunky drum'n'bass. Party time music.

Burial - Ghost Hardware

No sign of slacking here. Three tracks in the style of the album with lots of wet background noises and sad echoing vocals. Nothing new or much progression compared to his previous outings but that need not always be the case as we all know. I would have wished he'd chosen another title, though. "Hauntology", is there no escape?

Digitalism - Idealism
Justice
-

Or I'm getting old, or I just don't like this. The Digitalism album, though, is much better than the Justice abomination, which is just plain vulgar in its desire to please the less discerning ears. Furthermore I always will despise people who choose a symbol as title for their album. I am not going to waste any more words on this, neither am I going to vilify these guys. I just think Daft punk was better. So it would seem I am getting old after all. Nevertheless I am pretty sure that these two will tear the roof off in a live setting. Mixed feelings, then.

* There are two ways to interpret the fact that Mordant's "hauntology", a music that has library music has one of its main influences, is now in turn being used as library music. You could, if you are a believer, say that "hauntology" has come full circle. One could also, more viciously, state that it pre-empts itself, having turned into a sort of parody on its own influence. Probably the truth lies somewhere between a bit of both.

Saturday, June 16, 2007

Mixology

Two essential mixes floating around at the moment.

First up is Kode9's absolutely brilliant mix on the Sónar site. At the moment it is only streamable (is that an actual word?), but Kode9 has promised on his blog to make it available for download later on. And he'd better 'cause it is hot as hell featuring some brand new Hyperdub dubplates.

Next is Sebo K's mix for Resident Advisor, a site that has been responsable for the majority of good mixes on the net for the last year or so (Ewan Pearson, Ripperton, Alexander Robotnick). A very nice mix positioning itself somewhere between deep techno and house, with a few old hits thrown in for good measure.

As we speak the latest RA mix by up-and-coming man Efdemin has been added to the site. Listening to that one now, so do not really know whether it is recommendable.

Wednesday, May 02, 2007

A'right!

Am not a fan of Reynolds, but when it is good, why not say so, hey?

Nonetheless, there is something horribly wrong with music journalism if the facts of life are tackled by dinosaurs like Julian Cope and Simon Reynolds. So, thank God for the dinosaurs, then?