The Answer Is In The Beat

Kobosil: We Grow, You Decline (Ostgut Ton, 2016)

March 17, 2016 at 9:43 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

The first thing this artist name reminds me of is Hobo Barf, an imaginary band name made up by Longmont Potion Castle. I can’t see the name Kobosil without thinking Hobo Barf, I just can’t. Kobosil’s new album is not a split with Basilica Gel, nor is it made by a band of musical gnomes. Instead, it’s a Berlin-based dude who makes minimal, atmospheric techno which hisses and pulses. Tracks like “Reflection” and “The Exploring Mountain” have muted kick drums and synths which seem to gaze off rather than hone in. “Aim For Target” appropriately seems a little more focused, gradually moving closer and getting more intense but only really moving into clear view for a brief moment. “When I Speak” has eerie swirling voices taunting you, and “Eihwaz” is slow, creepy, ominous, and almost threatening. “You Answered With Love” has even more creepy, evil, cackling voices, and this time there’s a beat attached. “They Looked On” is another frightful, haunted track with a ticking beat. There’s plenty of tracks on this album that will work in a DJ mix set, but overall the album seems more concerned with sneaking up and scaring the bejeezus out of you.

Thomas P. Heckmann: Ghosts (Carpe Sonum Novum, 2015)

March 15, 2016 at 9:02 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Thomas P. Heckmann is the type of long-running, overwhelmingly prolific musician whose catalog I’ve almost entirely ignored, aside from a few compilation tracks and a GTO remix. This album just crossed my path, and just after listening to the first few tracks, it already sounded completely unbelievable. It seems like a cliche to refer to an album called Ghosts as haunting, especially with its shadowy artwork, but there really isn’t anything else this album could’ve been fittingly titled. Heckmann explains in the liner notes that while recording this album, he began to hear voices that weren’t there (or possibly were), and it’s not hard to hear what he’s talking about. This is legitimately chilling music, and it sounds better and more haunting the louder you turn it up. Dark drone music that makes extensive use of bass is always a good thing. “Scream” adds crushing Tim Hecker-y distortion (yes, their names are a bit similar, but Heckmann was around first) and it just slays. There’s just so much going on in these tracks, there really are a tone of barely perceptible sounds that sort of emerge through the fog and sometimes take over, turning into beats or beginning to sound like voices. An incredibly inventive, ever-shifting, honest-to-Satan frightening (at times) album.

Orson Hentschel: Feed the Tape (Denovali, 2016)

March 15, 2016 at 8:22 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Orson Hentschel’s electronic compositions utilize intense, stiff repetition, often sounding like a machine that’s been jammed and won’t budge, but he does shape them into rhythms that build and progress. His music is obviously inspired by classical minimalism, but he builds on that repetition until it converts into tension. Opener “16 mm” goes through various stages of Oval-like glitch before it settles on a suspenseful melody. The album’s cinematic title tracks utilizes string stabs and skittering drums, and “Slow-Moving” builds up eerie strings and circular melodies before fading to near silence and then building it all back up again. “Noise of the Light” is built on a stammering beat, eventually boiling up with smoking guitar and cracking drums. “Shirari” also begins with a loop that sounds like it’s stuck and then just builds on it, making a sneaking rhythm with wubby (yet nuanced) bass. It took me the entire 8 minutes of the song’s length to realize that the word “Shirari” was actually being looped throughout the entire song. The more ambient “Florence” seems to float free from rhythm, but its beginning features a loop of Philip Glass-like operatic vocals, which eventually appear again later in sync with clanging industrial loops. “What’s Going On” features more skipping loops (including its titular phrase) which become more intense when you realize there’s actual drums playing along to the loops and adding subtle embellishments. The track also goes through some quiet periods before returning to the intensity.

Sensational & Kruton: You In the Right Spot 12″ EP (Power Vacuum, 2016)

March 13, 2016 at 12:23 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

The main reason I’m reviewing this new Sensational EP is so I can immortalize the story of the one time I met the guy. It was about 10 years ago during the annual CMJ festival in NYC. I used to get free passes to CMJ every year when I was a DJ at WRSU in New Jersey. So I’d take the train into the city every night and go to a ton of shows for free. One time I was standing in line outside Webster Hall to try and get in to see Lady Sovereign (lol). This guy comes up to me and he introduces himself as Sensational and he has a new CDR that he’s trying to sell. I’m like oh wow cool, is it on WordSound? But it wasn’t, it was a self-released album. I didn’t really feel like buying it, I’m not really a huge fan of his, but obviously that CDR is pretty rare now. But anyway, he kept asking me if I could get him into the show, but I didn’t really have any way to do that so I couldn’t really do anything. But then when I got in, he found his way in too, and he recognized me and it was all good. Anyway, this EP is par for the course for him, “You In the Right Spot” is one of his more straight-up party tracks, and it’s presented in 2 versions (the “original demo” is the more dancey of the two). The other tracks have his trademark stream of consciousness style with kind of scattered beats and synths, but not as grimy as his early material, which was infamously recorded using headphones plugged into a microphone jack. This is still messy and abstract to most ears, but he knows what he’s doing.

Dubcon: Martian Dub Beacon (Metropolis/Subconscious Communications, 2016)

March 11, 2016 at 7:38 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Dubcon is a dubwise collision of Twilight Circus (Ryan Moore, formerly of Legendary Pink Dots) and cEvin Key (Skinny Puppy, Plateau, Download, etc). For all intents and purposes, this sounds like Twilight Circus, which means that it’s amazing modern dub. (Also I might as well mention that The Answer Is In The Beat is an indirect, in-joke reference to something Twilight Circus-related… it’s hard to explain, you had to be there.) The album sounds as extreterrestrial as the cover art, but despite the dubby effects and electronic rhythms and synth washes, it still has an earthly quality to it, thanks to drumming from the late, great Style Scott and vocals by Black Uhuru’s Michael Rose. A few tracks are influenced by dubstep’s golden era of a decade ago; “Something in the Sky” strongly resembles Pinch’s classic “Punisher” or any number of Distance singles from around that era. “Watching and Wondering” and “Red Planet” are both good mixes of cavernous, echoing vocals and dub-techno bass. The album seems to a unravel a bit with the trippy, swirling crossed radio-waves of “Passing Phobos”, the final track. I don’t have the best desktop stereo setup in my room, but this album sounds nice and booming.

Midwich Productions megapost

March 5, 2016 at 4:31 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

James Marlon Magas co-founded the beyond-legendary Michigan noise label Bulb Records in the early ’90s before moving to Chicago. Last year, he started a new techno label called Midwich Productions, and all of the releases are super high quality with stunning artwork. The label’s first release is a double 12″ by Moon Pool & Dead Band, a techno offshoot of Bulb Records alumni Wolf Eyes. All 4 sides of this record are devoted to mixes of the duo’s most straightforward dancefloor jam yet, “MEQ”. Sludgy and suspenseful horror-influenced techno, with a cluster of scuzzy sounds and delay over a straightforward beat with a bit of a disco shuffle to it. The various mixes all emphasize certain elements of the track, sometimes making it a bit higher fidelity, but they all keep its spirit intact. Dykehouse increases the tempo a little bit, adds a slight bit more of a disco bassline, but keeps a lot of the swarming noise. Patrick Russell’s mix is a bit more minimal and icy, sounding like a disco inside a snowglobe. JTC (Tadd Mullinix) goes for a stripped down acid jam, emphasizing the melody and adding some dub-techno and ’80s disco textures. Definitely one of the highlights of the package. WCBN/Crush Collision’s own BMG does the longest mix (nearly 8 minutes), and it’s one of the darkest, most minimal ones here, submerging the sounds under an insistent bassline and a sparse, ticking beat. ErNo (also known as Erno the Inferno) starts out by mutating the sounds under a regular shuffling beat, then it gets deeper and more pounding before returning to the original mode. Ice Cold Chrissy (aka Coyote Clean Up) works that 100% Silk magic, pouring fizzy neon cola over everything and turning it into trippy, strobe light echo chamber disco. Nate Young ends the set with a Wolf Eyes mix, slowing the tempo down to a drunken stumble and adding some guitar notes along with the corroded electronics. It ends up really heavy and sludgy, sinking further and further into a pit of quicksand.

Next up is Magas’ own Heads Plus 12″ EP, which is a bit different than the electro-punk records he put out on Ersatz Audio over a decade ago. The tracks here have steady tempos aimed at the dancefloor, but there’s still layers of buzzing distortion and other sounds sources from junky old electronic equipment. “Heads Plus” seems like it’s going to turn out to be a pretty straightforward house groove, with conga-like percussive rhythms, but then there’s a mess of sloppy (but not really noisy) sounds lurking beneath, and a “Blue Monday”-ish melody poking its way through. “Checkers” has more of an electro-punk beat, and develops a very simplistic buzzing, festering melody which boils over into feedback until it’s not really a melody after all. “Machete King” seems to have twangy guitar riffs, but they’re entirely synthesized, and some siren-like melodies skitter and whizz by in the background. “Countess” has a bit more of a euphoric cyber-disco groove, with a nice synth bassline and some dubby echo effects over the insistent 4/4 beat. “Layers of Understanding” is a little slower and way more haunted, with just a few simple, creeping melodies progressing over its minimalist horror-disco beat.

Viands’ Temporal Relics LP is a document of an improvised session recorded at Trinosophes in Detroit’s Eastern Market by Dave Shettler (Moon Pool & Dead Band) and Joel Peterson (Chatoyant). It’s definitely the least “techno” sounding of the first 4 Midwich Productions releases, but there’s still a distant rhythmic pulse guiding these synth explorations, at least for part of the way. The first side definitely seems more focused, with expressive melodies flowing over the ticking rhythm, which kind of dissolves near the end of the side. The second side starts with the rhythm, but most of the side is more of a nebulous, freeform exploration, getting quite sparse at times, and meandering through outer-space jazz keyboard sounds most of the way.

Mick Travis used to live in Ypsilanti, and he put out a noise tape on Hanson Records in 2008, but Face Disappears After Interrogation is his excursion into abstract modular synth techno. It’s basically just twitching synth sounds, blips from a rhythm box which sounds like it’s malfunctioning, and some tape echo. As simple as that sounds, “Multiple Roles” still sounds like there’s three rhythms going on at once, making it sound delightfully confusion. “Aggravate the Grave” is a bit more uptempo, bouncy, and a bit squishy. “Face Disappears After Interrogation” is 9 minutes of staring into the void, with a sparse, jumpy rhythm and dark, delayed synth washes, and little else. “Frigid Finger” has another jumpy, messy-but-minimal rhythm and a kind of silly, squealing synth line, and then it ends with a nervous stammer.

Coming next month are new Midwich releases from HIDE and Alex Barnett.