The Answer Is In The Beat

FaltyDL: In The Wild (Ninja Tune, 2014)

August 6, 2014 at 10:00 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Prolific NYC-based producer FaltyDL is already on his second Ninja Tune album, following last year’s Hardcourage. That album was his most accessible release to date, providing an easily danceable (and sometimes loungeable) distillation of his take on current bass-heavy dance music. This sprawling 17-track effort is a lot more abstract, and while it isn’t quite as crazy as his early breakcore releases, it’s closer to his older releases on Planet Mu such as the Bravery EP. There’s plenty of shorter, ambient interlude tracks, and a lot of the proper songs seem to have their minds fixated somewhere other than the dancefloor. The album’s title suggests jungle/wildlife imagery, and there’s a lot of tracks with hand drums and shaking and rattling sounds, some approximating tambourines like you’d hear in a jungle (as in drum’n’bass) track, and others are more in an exotica sense. No tracks have full vocals the way his last album’s single “She Sleeps” did, but there’s chopped, sampled vocals on a bunch of the tracks. “Do Me” is the first track with a solid danceable beat, and the way it kicks in after about 2 minutes, it might as well be saying “doomy”. “Nine” basically sounds like the intro to a jungle/d’n’b record gets stuck, and then he just builds a beat around it and goes from there. “Frontin” chops up a voice saying “frontin’ on some bullshit”, approximating a slower, more uneasy, less in-your-face juke track. “Untitled 12” is a 4 minute ambient track in which you keep expecting a beat to drop, but it never does, and then “Ahead The Ship Sleeps” is a slow, jazzy downtempo-house track. “Dos Gardenias” build up delicate guitar samples and sinister synths and echoes, then a surprising beat erupts 2 minutes in. “Heart & Soul” flirts with abrasive breakbeats and fluttery vocals, not quite arriving on full-on junglism, but tantalizing nonetheless. Watch for the way it breaks down into a slower tempo during the last minute. “Grief” works its way through another broken-down rhythm, but eventually seems to just give up. “In The Shit” is a quizzical, mad-scientist track with deep bass tones, pizzicato strings, spiralling synths, and more submerged jungle breaks. “Danger” is the street corner where future garage and ’90s jungle meet, with choppy (but not overdriven) breaks, mellow synths and a constant voice proclaiming “danger!” “Some Jazz Shit” is the album’s longest track at 6 minutes, and the best 4/4 dance track, and even it’s a bit of a slow burner with a slightly relaxed tempo.

What We’ll Be: Subject/Object 12″ (We Are All Machines, 2014)

August 5, 2014 at 10:18 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Debut 12″ by this project of Pipé Scuttleworth, also of The Siege. The material that I’ve heard from that group sounded somewhat like a more overtly techno version of New Order to my ears, and this one has a similar live band electronic feel, but more downtempo. “Clara Moonglow’s Magic” has sort of a lonely desert highway drive vibe similar to FWY!, taking its sweet time to draw a straight line. “Opener For A Yoshi Maru Dragon Year” has a bit more complicated beat structures, but it still a calm atmosphere. “Snow Day” is an icy journey that takes a while to slowly wake up, but eventually rides gliding synths through a ticking beat before crumbling into gravel. “Yoshi’s Quaalude” is briefer and more kompakt, packing twinkling melodies and a steady beat into a couple of all-too-short minutes.

Long Distance Poison: Feorh tape (Tusco/Embassy, 2014)

August 3, 2014 at 11:16 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Newest, nautical-themed release from LDP. Both sides are titled “Brym”, and the first starts to paint a picture with its subtitle, “Shoreline A Boat Found/Drowning”. This is the sound of a lighthouse scanning a dark sea, looking to find anything lost in the trenches. And of course when something is found, it’s horrible and tragic and unspeakable, and causes woe and grief. “Brym II”, on the other side, is subtitled “Ocean’s Trench/A Light/Wombs”, and seems to suggest new hope. It’s definitely lighter, has a brighter tone and more of a rhythm, although in typical LDP fashion, it takes a long time to build. It gets way more distorted, way more noisy, and more jittery and flashy. Instead of scanning the seas for ruin, it’s more about scanning the sky for life and activity.

Various Artists: Yearbook Detroit 2014 LP (ZZZ Tapes, 2014)

August 3, 2014 at 10:37 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Haven’t heard too much about Detroit-based ZZZ Tapes, but they put on a house show last month and everyone who paid the $10 admission got a copy of this LP. I heard someone say Fred Thomas mixed and mastered it, and it sounds great, especially considering how lo-fi most of the source material is. The first side is mostly in the indie/freak-folk ballpark, but it ends with a pretty fantastic trippy guitar/chiming-synth track by Space Indigo. Side B starts with some harder-edged bands, with The Wire Eyes sounding like Zola Jesus fronting a moody post-punk band. Then there’s wiry, zippy punk-pop from Reverend (who I thought were slower and sludgier when I saw them, unless I’m thinking of someone else, or this song just sounds different than what they played live), moshcore from S.N.A.F.U., and a pretty crazy, loose, thrashy cover of “I Want You/She’s So Heavy” by a band simply known as Touch. The rest of the disc is all electronic acts, with Jaws That Bite providing some hyperactive juke, and then a mindblowing track called “Skitchin'” from chiptune/noise/uncategorizable artist Barbeque. GGMAH’s track is steeped in echo and sludge, and then Airjob’s track is a wobbly, splashy moonwalk.

Thought Broadcast: Votive Zero LP (Editions Mego, 2014

August 3, 2014 at 9:53 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Thought Broadcast’s Emergency Stairway was a huge surprise to me, and easily one of my favorite albums of 2012. It had such a paranoid, brittle sound that really made you feel like someone was reaching inside your head and reading your thoughts, especially with all the completely incomprehensible muttered vocals. Now the follow-up has arrived, and it’s still incredibly lo-fi and paranoid, but it feels like the scope has been widened a little bit. It feels like there’s a little bit more attention paid to the beats, rather than the monotonous clanking of the previous album. There’s more of a noticeable dub influence, especially on the tumbling, flanged, echoing beats of “Forged Body”. It feels like he’s crawled out of the sewer and is now merely in some dark, dank alley. Both versions of “Runaway Signal” end up sounding like a soundclash between a jackhammer drill and a cement mixer. Overall, a really good album, but I feel like his previous one was just so much more unhinged and volatile. This one seems like he has more control of the broadcast, and somehow it loses a little of its effect by being more focused.

Pinkcourtesyphone: Description Of Problem (Line, 2014)

August 1, 2014 at 10:17 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

The newest installment of Richard Chartier’s prolific cinematic drone project (its 5th CD since 2012) is loaded with guests, featuring contributions from William Basinski (via voicemail), AGF, Cosey Fanni Tutti of Throbbing Gristle, Kid Congo Powers and Evelina Domnitch. “Description Of Problem / More Everything” invites comparisons to Basinski’s own Disintegration Loops, as his voice is looped and decayed and disintegrated, over rolling melancholy melodic loops and hissing drone. Its second half features a voice repeating “maybe too much… I want more… everything”, beckoning revelatory events to take place. “Perfunctory Attachments” features no guests, but starts with echo-shrouded French speaking, and then an even more Disintegration Loops-like faded melody is looped. The voice seems to have stopped speaking and is only sighing, and you’re sitting up, concerned, wondering what’s going to happen. It seems like terror could strike at any moment. The storm of tensions seems to die down, but there’s still a buzzing drone and more looped sighing. Police sirens wail in the distance. The looped melody returns, but the notes become lower and sadder. It ends with a door closing and a “voila!” “Our Story” begins with AGF whispering about shadows and spells over soft pulses, which turn into a more abrasive rhythm. There’s a steady pulse, and some beats that shove and flange, but it still doesn’t feel like any sort of beat intended to make you move. But that’s beside the point. It sounds intriguing and makes you focus on the whisperings and the otherworldly sounds surrounding them. “Boundlessly” is nearly 20 minutes long, starting with a tiny, footstep-like beat and glistening, slightly metallic wind. Cosey’s voice slowly and boldly breaks through this, telling a striking tale of an abused woman. The words are deliberately spaced out and echoed a few times so they have a lasting impact. The line “or so it may seem” ominously repeat several times while fading out to some cricket-like chirping electronic sounds, which continue walking down the minimal footstep path, stopping when Cosey starts repeating the words “I love you boundlessly” for the remainder of the piece. Last year’s remix release Please Pick Up featured a few different takes on the Kid Congo Powers collaboration “iamaphotograph”, but this release’s “darkroomversion” is possibly the darkest and creepiest version yet. His voice is distorted in such a ghastly tone, there’s no other way to hear it as anything other than being spoken by a demonic ghost. The music is smothered and choked, but it still has a rhythm carrying the ghoulish words. The piece ends with the vocals sounding more hellish than ever, repeating “I am a photograph, but my soul is missing.” The album ends with a truly lovely, affecting song called “I Wish You Goodbye”, with Evelina Domnitch’s voice bidding us farewell in the beginning, and a looped synth melody that swells up more than anywhere else on the album. She returns at the end, wishing you shelter from the storm before saying goodbye, and a haunting cry of “goodnight”.

Seth Cluett: Forms of Forgetting (Line, 2014)

August 1, 2014 at 9:16 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

A slowly progressing, hour-long drone concerned with memory and attention. It fades in very slowly, with sharp, vibrating sine waves getting bigger and louder and slowly drifting from one frequency to another. I listened to this while falling asleep, and it ended up creating a sort of hallucinatory neon light show in my mind, as the sounds here bend in strange ways and take on different shapes and dimensions. There’s never too much going on at any given time, but what is happening is more than enough to focus your attention on, or trick your mind into seeing strange things when you’re being inattentive.