June 13, 2020 at 7:27 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
scrap.edx: People of the Longhouse
Based in my home state (Connecticut), scrap.edx has been producing high-quality breakcore, rhythmic noise, IDM, and what have you for around 20 years now.
“People of the Longhouse” is a technoid track with some industrious percussion and some glitching, but it’s all very precise, clean, ordered, and functional. A sample during a pause in the rhythm projects a message against police-state surveillance, and the beat gets stompier, injecting just the right dose of energy for the message at hand. The other track on this single is by Children of Men, a hip-hop project scrap.edx’s Joshua Colella, and it sounds something like Aesop Rock recording in a cave with a broken beatbox. The beat drips like water from a stalactite and the emcee’s rapidfire rhymes bounce off the cave walls, getting more tragic and macabre as they progress.
June 12, 2020 at 7:39 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Enduser: Timeline EP
One of several Enduser releases so far this year,
Timeline is a 30-minute cassette released by a label based in Rotterdam. It’s a mixture of live tracks plus bits from collaborations and field recordings, each mixed into a side-long track rather than separated out into distinct songs. It starts out with some choppy, oldskool-leaning breakbeats with atmospheric post-rock guitars and continues in a sort of dark yet breezy direction. The beats are persistent but there isn’t any heavy, growling bass charging hard, it’s way more reflective than that. And then just a few minutes before the end of the first side, divebombing breakcore erupts out of nowhere, elevating what already seemed grand into something transcendent. The start of side B dices up some voices (an investigative report, maybe?) then drives breaks through some landmine fields. It picks up a bit more than side A and feels a bit more like a chase through different dimensions. Distant transmissions from Thailand and Malaysia add a ghostly presence to the mix. It gets a bit more storming by the end, but still keeping a gentle melodic feel. I should probably also mention Enduser’s song
“Collapse”, another recent Bandcamp upload, which instantly became one of my favorite works of his on first listen. So destructive, so furious, so much going on. Instant classic.
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The Answer Is In The Beat 