September 25, 2016 at 7:36 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Variant: Sequential Sleep 2CD
Variant is Stephen Hitchell (aka Intrusion), who is part of cv313 and Echospace along with Deepchord’s Rod Modell. He has dozens of albums as Variant and, unsurprisingly, they’re all pretty similar, especially his newer releases which mostly consist of hour-long aquatic ambient dub tracks. I have several of them, and for whatever reason, this one has been hitting me the hardest. Very washed-out, slow-moving, weightless, but bass-heavy, fluid, and amorphous. One disc is the “Granular Mix” and the other is the “Modular Mix”, and there’s apparently another version of the same album (with the same title and barcode) that has dub versions of both. So what makes this Variant album stand out from the others? I’m not really sure. I feel like searching for the answer to that question will take away from my enjoyment of it. All I know is that it feels like being in some sort of weird flotation tank and the last thing I want to do is get out of it. Both discs are an hour long each and I thought they were too short.
September 18, 2016 at 5:27 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Koba/Matthew Crowe: split tape
Koba shreds. Not quite in the way you’d expect though. Actually I can’t even tell if he’s playing a guitar. Nevertheless there is some sort of intense riffing going on, and sometimes it just breaks some sort of threshold of intensity. Matthew Crowe wields some sort of device that makes really rusty feedback. It’s pretty controlled though, it comes close to lacerating your eardrums but it never quite gets there. His untitled piece is 13 minutes so it’s pretty easy to get lost in it. Anyway, free DL at
Bandcamp.
September 18, 2016 at 4:48 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Funkhouser: Reworks Drekka tape
On this tape, Indiana’s Rob Funkhouser takes a Drekka LP from last year (plus live performances from around the time of its recording) and transforms it into something else. Very foggy and amorphous, but yet it’s also glitchy and somewhat sharpened. Imagine smog that’s holographic and projects visions, but can also sort of cut you. But not in a painful way. A dark gray atmosphere made of crystals which are no longer solid but they can still channel the future and alternate dimensions. Available on
Bandcamp.
September 18, 2016 at 4:12 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
SeixlacK: Bed Bug Bites 12″ EP
Brazilian producer Fernando Seixlack released an incredible LP of hissy techno on Delroy Edwards’ L.A. Club Resource under the name INNSYTER earlier this year. This EP sounds slightly less outsider-y, but it’s still super raw and high quality. “Wintergreen” has a cool cowbell-like sound and some sort of bubbly, whooshy synths. “Sofazone” is a slightly higher fidelity electro track. All of this is rad, seems like everything he’s doing under both names is incredible. Also the name SeixlacK sounds like “sex lack” which *sigh* yeah.
September 11, 2016 at 3:07 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Val G: EP 12″
Second release on local label Vanity Press Records, run by Dave Marroquin who hosts
Hot Juice on WCBN. “Headed East” is a pretty straightforward pounding techno track which cuts out and has minor variations during its 5 minute before ending suddenly. “For Me” is based on an overused Aaliyah sample but it actually manages to sound fresh and different. It’s just nice and sunny and relaxing, and Dave plays sax on it! “Frostbite” is maybe the most L.I.E.S.-y track here, just a really solid lo-fi stripped-down house track. “Further” is an unexpected edit of NIN’s “Closer”, the beats and synth melodies are all there, along with some strange distant speaking, it’s just sped up a bit and smoothed out for the dancefloor. No guitars and Trent’s voice is nowhere to be heard, which means that it’s completely clean for daytime airplay. So far this one’s only available at Detroit-area record stores but keep checking the Vanity Press
Facebook page about online distro.
September 5, 2016 at 9:06 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Umberto: Alienation
After a few Italo-disco-ish singles and some soundtrack releases on Death Waltz, Matt Hill’s Umberto project returns to Not Not Fun for its fourth proper (non-soundtrack) album. This one shows more range than previous Umberto releases, ranging from atmospheric theme-like pieces to haunted electro-disco to ethereal ballads that come close to sounding like Black Tape For a Blue Girl. This one didn’t stand out as much as past Umberto releases the first time I listened, but after numerous listens it grew on me and now I love it. This guy is easily up there with S U R V I V E and Xander Harris as far as recreating the suspenseful synth sounds of the ’80s. He just needs to get lucky scoring something that ends up going viral the way
Stranger Things did so he can get the recognition he deserves.
August 27, 2016 at 9:07 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Sally Shapiro: If You Ever Wanna Change Your Mind 7″
A decade after the release of
Disco Romance (a very important album to my past, present and future for many reasons), Swedish duo Sally Shapiro have announced that they will no longer be making music together. This is their final single, and it’s every bit as gorgeous, bittersweet, catchy, etc. as any of their other classic songs. Similar to their last album, they’ve moved on from strictly trying to sound like Italo-disco, although the influence is still there. It’s a little more lush and live-sounding (relatively, it’s still electronic) and there’s vocoders peering through the shadows. The melody/structure bears a little bit of a resemblance to “Never Gonna Give You Up”, which might sound like a lazy comparison but I think it fits, it’s that sort of pop thrill, even if this song is way more subdued. I love how the title’s sentiment is so open-ended, as if they’re saying they’re always open to making music together again someday. Even if that never happens, they’re concluding an astonishing run. Aside from the perfect A-side, the B-side is an acoustic David Guetta cover. That sounds like something dredged up from the depths of YouTube hell, but it’s not bad. Stripped of EDM garishness and graced by Sally’s voice, it sounds like a decent little tune. The digital version of the single has 2 remixes of the A-side, which are decent but I prefer the original. Tommy ’86 brings the song to the dancefloor, while Ben Macklin’s is more subdued and I think I like that one better.
August 27, 2016 at 8:37 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Futureslum: Crushed Flowers in Skeletal Hands tape
This is a continuous 38-minute montage of beats which sound like they were played on some sort of toy drum machine (complete with really cheap scratch effects) and then overloaded with distortion and feedback. The entire thing is repeated on both sides. It’s a toy hip-hop noise beat tape, or something. There’s only a few moments where it sounds like there’s a melody or voice poking through, but mostly it suggests what could be some monstrous tracks if they were fully developed with more instrumentation or vocals. However, they’re pretty explosive as they are, almost approaching DHR-level menace. Someone just gave me an old drum machine, this makes me want to try making the clunkiest beats I can come up with and just distort the hell out of them. Available on
Bandcamp.
August 27, 2016 at 8:09 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Khost: Needles Into the Ground – Deconstructed and Reconstructed by Godflesh
Khost is a project of Birmingham’s Andy Swan, who used to be in Final with Justin Broadrick. I haven’t heard anything else by Khost, I have to admit that the presence of the name Godflesh is the main draw for me here. But holy hell, this is some of the hardest ripping Broadrick material I’ve heard in a while. “Inversion” is just searing and relentless. “Revelations Vultures Jackals Wolves” is so distorted that it chokes you. “Deathsset” is a new Khost track untouched by Broadrick, and it feels a bit less claustrophobic and punishing, although there’s more vocals and a bit more guitar-sounding guitar. It’s pretty good but Broadrick really brings his A-game here.
August 27, 2016 at 7:57 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
WMX: Complicit
Incredible new
FREE release from one of the absolute best guys doing dark noisy industrial breakcore right now. It’s basically a continuous 33-minute suite, starting out slow and pounding with some harsh breaks, then it speeds up and gets more exciting. “WORLD” is explosive. From there it never lets up, and halfway through “SAVE” it transforms from hardcore to speedcore for a few schizophrenic minutes before somewhat straightening out again. “IT” is a little slower after that near-seizure. Incredible release, this and his split 12″ with Bombardier both destroy. Also somehow I didn’t realize until just now that he’s in the industrial group Bestial Mouths, who put out an album on Dais Records a while ago and are now on Cleopatra.
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The Answer Is In The Beat 