December 2, 2020 at 7:33 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Nahash: Flowers of the Revolution
SVBKVLT continues its currently flawless run with the latest album from Nahash, a project helmed by producer/engineer Raphaël Valensi and visual artist Tina Blakeney. Inspired by “the flowers that never grew, the fields that were burnt down, the plants that were trampled by boots”, the album is a set of hard, post-industrial club tracks which draw from various definitions of hardcore, as well as reggaeton, the more dread-heavy Hyperdub releases, and more. Openr “The Horns” (with Osheyack) is just a stormer which shapes explosive sound editing and rapturous strings into a locked-in dance track. “Changement De Régime” spikes The Bug-style mutated dancehall with runaway jungle breaks, and “Sangre Y Poder” adds gabber kicks to dembow, then surrounds it with spacey echo and sirens. “Montreal Terror Corps” is basically deconstructed gabber, proclaiming itself “hardcore like a nuclear bomb” and pacing out its explosive beats so it isn’t just a constant attack. Ultimately it’s much more frightening this way. The best of the remixes is DJ Plead’s “A Better Future”, a fast reggaeton track with is brisk and spacious yet still filled with bursts of menace.
December 1, 2020 at 7:43 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Sandy Ewen: You Win LP
Sandy Ewen’s
first solo LP is apparently guitar-based, but it’s extremely difficult to tell how she’s coming up with these sounds. The album’s title track takes up the entire first side, and it starts out sounding like physical currents rolling around before the plumes of feedback eventually start blinking like alarms. She seems to strangle the daylights out of her guitar, squeezing out some notes but mostly producing violent, panned vibrations. It eventually drifts into a tunnel of loose, spacious thrums and metallic resonances, moving far away from the more grounded rumbling of the piece’s beginning. The alarm beeps can’t quite go away until the very end, though. “Virginia Creeper” is maybe the most lowercase track here; some scrounging around but not a whole lot happens. “Serra” is a floating feedback sculpture which sounds like it might be bowed, but it’s hard to tell. “Face Topography” is far more fractured and splintered, almost sounding like an electroacoustic tape piece performed live on a guitar. “Square Waves” is another sort of floating pieces filled with ringing, lightly clanging tones. Ewen has created
videos for these pieces, which incorporate a lot of innovative processes, and look pretty amazing based on the still images, but I haven’t gotten around to checking them out yet (my wifi connection can be pretty fussy sometimes).
December 1, 2020 at 6:31 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Richard Devine: Systik
With his
new record, Richard Devine returns to making acid music after 25 years, but using pieces from his current gargantuan collection of gear. This includes a portable modular system and two modified 303s. The four tracks were recorded in singles takes, as this material was intended for his 2020 live sets. The music is a far cry from when I saw him at the underground stage of the Movement festival several years ago, when he was playing harsh, glitchy noise and people couldn’t escape fast enough. Instead, this is more danceable, certainly helped by the 303 acid elements, but the beats are still corrupted and twitchy enough for the IDM nerd brigade. The first two marathon tracks get mega hectic and fractured, in a fun way, but “TiMetrics” is more of a straightforward electro stormer. “5schim” is the shortest and most joyous of all, just a glorious 4.5 minutes of gleeful acid and the type of choppy rave-inspired breakbeats that remain a perennial favorite of AFX and Squarepusher.
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The Answer Is In The Beat 