June 11, 2022 at 6:54 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Wavejumpers: The Sunken Treasure EP
Underground Resistance doesn’t release new music very often, so a new batch of fresh releases and reissues is major news. Unfortunately
Submerge wasn’t open this year during Movement weekend, but the nearby
Underground Music Academy hosted a popup shop which stocked some UR merchandise. The most buzzed-about new UR release is the EP by
Wavejumpers, a duo including Tyree Stinson, brother of the late James Stinson of Drexciya. Tyree previously released music on UR as part of the Aquanauts. As expected, this is Drexciyan electro machine funk, although it seems a little more repetitive than that group. The tracks are meant to be played at 33, but there’s pitched down voices and kind of stiff midtempo beats, yet it clearly sounds wrong at 45. The last track has a pretty excellent groove but the ending is surprisingly abrupt. It’s a good record but it isn’t going to surprise anyone who is familiar with Drexciya or UR.
Mano De Fuego: 12″ EP
, on the other hand! I had no idea what I was in for, and as soon as I put the needle down on the first side, I was just grinning from ear to ear. Straight up classic UR, at their most positive and uplifting. “Sol” just bleeds sunshine and I could listen to it on loop for hours. “Descenso” is more electro, and “Mito” is another truly joyous, lightbringing UR-style techno-soul track. Just a lovely, amazing record. Essential UR and an excellent first showing from the mysterious Cedillo Brothers.
Mike Ellison: Covalence 12″
I also picked up a new reissue of Electric Soul’s “X²”, a classic Mad Mike electro track originally released on Direct Beat in 1996. I hadn’t even heard this track before, but it was a huge late night radio hit in Detroit back in the day apparently, just a fantastic night cruiser with effects-shrouded vocals and a levitating synth break. The reissue has a remix by Tommie Cool, which I guess must be new, but it’s minimal and barely has any vocals and it’s just not as memorable or exciting as the original. Finally, the other new UR release I picked up was
“Covalence” by Mike Ellison. It has four versions of the same track, two on a house side and two on a techno side. Mark Flash’s edit on the house side is the winner, with more UR-style uplifting synth chords backing and elevating the spoken poetry, which touches on Detroit techno’s legacy and its future. The poem is then isolated on its own. On the other side, the Detroit Tech Edit strips out nearly all the words and just sticks to the beats, then the Extended Edit incorporates the full lyrics, but there’s a lengthy instrumental intro so it’s easy to mix. Definitely more of a DJ tool side, I like the fuller emotions of the Mark Flash mix better, personally.
June 7, 2022 at 7:50 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Peter Coccoma: A Place to Begin
Ambient composer Peter Coccoma’s
first album was inspired by a trip to a frozen island in the far north part of Lake Superior, following the near death of a loved one. Coccoma worked on music there as winter turned to spring and the lake gradually thawed away, and eventually the water burst forth into motion. His music seems to capture that seasonal awakening, from the rising of “Opening” onwards. Reverb stretches the keyboard notes and strings (by Clarice Jensen and Oliver Hill) outward, dissolving them into mist and regenerating. “A Connection to All Things” has a much deeper bass swerve than you would expect for an ambient piece (that one Stars of the Lid track notwithstanding), and “Towards Light” has some similar rumbling at the beginning, reminding me of Thomas Köner’s best work. “Clouds of Understanding” has richer strings, turning into more of a neo-classical meditation. The short but sweet album ends with the cloudy, slightly warbly tone poem “Begin”.
June 6, 2022 at 6:08 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
µ-Ziq: Goodbye Remixes
Right in front of this Friday’s release of the
new µ-Ziq album, I figure I’d better post something about
his latest EP, which is remixes of the EP built around the album’s first single.
Magic Pony Ride is intended to be a sort of sequel to
Lunatic Harness, which is getting a
25th anniversary reissue soon, so it’s a return to the more jungle and breakbeat hardcore-influenced side of µ-Ziq, but not quite the type of inspired madness present on his most legendary album. “Goodbye VIP” is basically just a bass-heavier variation on the single. The remixes come closer to the footwork influences of his work from the 2010s, and the Planet Mu label as a whole, since that sound is generally missing on the album proper. Still, footwork-adjacent producers like RP Boo and Jlin incorporate more breakbeats than on their usual work, and DJ Manny seems to toughen “Goodbye” up a little bit without losing its essence. Newcomer Xylitol helps the track bloom a bit more, giving it more springlike synths as well as harder breaks and more biting acid.
June 4, 2022 at 11:51 am | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Raphy: You Can Have A Piece Of My Soul For The Lows
A member of the Detroit Lines collective as well as Danny Brown’s Bruiser Brigade, Raphy presents
this mixtape made up of 16 vignettes, each of which seem to be fashioned from old soul records played with a needle that constantly skips. The tracks are slowed, stuttered, and played at shifting speeds, and there’s also a sort of morse code beep pinging through it all. It’s just a masterful example of how to take broken, malfunctioning “mistake” sounds and incorporate them into something that sounds complete and deliberate. Glitch-hop rarely ever sounds this soulful.
June 3, 2022 at 8:51 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Saajtak: For the Makers
Detroit electro-prog band Saajtak have finally released
a full-length after putting out several mesmerizing EPs and becoming a must-see live act. Their songs are unpredictable collisions of hard-to-contain rhythms, synth cascades, and Alex Koi’s operatic, expressionist vocals. “Concertmate 680”, early on in the album, is the type of Saajtak track that catches my attention, with fast, rattling drums and tumbling synth notes and glitches, plus vocals that soar and re-sample and fold in on themselves. “There’s a Leak in the Shielding” is one of the album’s progressive epics, flowing from poetry to dream pop to freewheeling drum alchemy. Detroit saxophonist Marcus Elliot guests on the prismatic funk jam “Borders”, then “Oak Heart” is a time-dilating duet with the stunning David Magumba. “Mightier Mountains Have Crumbled”, the final 8-minute suite, has space for both tender, floating vocals and abrasive noise-spiked frenetic, physical percussion. I’m absolutely amazed to see the progression this band has made, landing on a well-regarded label like American Dreams and expanding their collaborative circle.
June 2, 2022 at 6:24 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Automatisme & Stefan Paulus: Gap/Void
Automatisme’s
third full-length on Constellation is a collaboration with Stefan Paulus, a Swiss writer, artust, and field recorder who has released several ambient albums on his own. Paulus recorded audio incorporating natural and musical drones, and Automatisme tore them apart and re-arranged them into beat-forward compositions, as well as more intense soundscapes. Opener “Säntis” starts out accumulating audio precipitation, then surges into broken, static-riddled beat patterns, sounding dubbed out then washed with lo-bit distortion. Then it all falls silent before roaring winds slowly take over. Then “Marwees” drizzles low, thumping kick drums with cloudy vibrations. “Üble Schlucht” has a steady pace but the beats themselves become frantic and bunched-up, only rinsing out near the end. “Blau Schnee” has a steady, upfront beat, and a gorgeous swirl of dub-techno echoes gradually takes shape. “Stoos” ticks along in 3/4 time, with maintaining steady propulsion as the additional, detached textures seem to get jostled around. “Wisswand” is a minimal industrial trudge, and it’s hard to tell exactly what the time sig is, the loops crumble to dust under the beats. “Schwarzhorn” and “Tothore” are both ambient pieces that blur natural sound together with shoegazey distortion. “Nob” throws all these elements in a pressure cooker, ending up with vibrating noise but boiling away the beat. “Wisshorn” feels like several storms superimposed, ending up like a dub vortex of gloom. The release could easily appeal to fans of the more ambient side of dub techno (beatless releases by Rod Modell and various Basic Channel affiliates) as well as sound artists like Daniel Menche, and of course Loscil and Gas.
June 1, 2022 at 8:32 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Jana Rush: Dark Humor
Continually taking her music into darker, more disturbing directions,
Jana Rush’s new EP is an aural black comedy, expressing frank sexual tension as well as brutal self-deprecation. “Suicidal Ideation (Aural Hallucinations Mix)” is a nine-minute mental horror show with absurdly undanceable splatter-beats, sinister laughter, and a fractured Dr. Dre sample. “Don’t Want No Dick” subverts that “Short Dick Man” song into a brief, sharp queer statement, and the later “Make Bitches Cum” is similarly upfront. “Break It (Remix)” and “Lonely” (feat. DJ Paypal) are both jazzy cut-ups, with “Lonely” the most frenetic and stretched-out, turning into a sort of footwork free jazz. “Unk” and the particularly vicious “Clown” (“Tonight the DJ is a clown!”) are so funny it hurts. Even after being enraptured by her previous 2 albums, this took a few listens to sink in, but it’s definitely not a lesser release.
May 31, 2022 at 6:29 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Naja Naja: EP
Naja Naja are a Beijing-based duo with connections to Gong Gong Gong, hence the release of
their EP through Wharf Cat. They uses guitars, synths, and drum programming to write songs with steady, propulsive rhythms and lyrics which could accompany dystopian minimalist synth pop from the early ’80s. The music definitely has a resemblance to new wave, but it’s just as likely to register as post-punk, indie rock, or even Krautrock. “New Toy” has fuzzy, distorted guitar and monotone vocals to match lyrics about a product that will supposedly improve and enhance your life. “Dong Dong” is music for a very lo-fi bedroom dance party, maybe even a lightswitch rave, ending with the refrain “Dance with the drag queen”. After the slower, lyrically surreal “Running Dog, Floating Elephant”, “Sunset Shopping Center” is an upbeat instrumental with a motorik rhythm and sunny guitar melodies which could easily have appeared on a Michael Rother album. “Copy of You” is darker and closer to the goth end of post-punk, and then finally “Tunnel” is a more restrained number that lets the EP fade away in the distance.
May 26, 2022 at 9:16 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Torn: Exit EP
Torn follows his astonishing album
Borderline with this
four-track EP, intended as the final chapter of the album’s narrative. Out-for-blood d’n’b crafted with utter precision, much like his labelmate and sometime collaborator Homemade Weapons. The first three tracks are the sound of controlled combustion, with “Oar” being the sharpest and deadliest. Then the final “Tempest Of Lust” is a doom metal drone that only briefly features some thundering percussion. After this string of releases, Torn is permanently on my watch list.
May 24, 2022 at 9:14 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
G Jones & EPROM: Acid Disk 2
G Jones was entirely off my radar before I heard “A2C2I2D”, apparently an in-demand track from his recent live shows, when it was released as a single earlier this year. This was a rare instance when I had to instantly replay a song the first time I heard it because it was just too much to process at first. Distorted blown-out acid breaks at its filthiest, yet enough of a consistent groove that I can easily mix it in a Crush Collision set.
This EP with EPROM (another well-known EDM type I haven’t really paid attention to) does further damage, going for a similar acid breaks hybrid, but taking it in so many other directions. EPROM’s “Facebang (Acid Mix)”, presumably a tribute to Bangface, starts out with an almost majestic intro before absolutely pummeling with brutal, pitched-down breakbeats. G Jones’ “On the Platform” has hi-tech acid synths similar to recent Squarepusher, and then it just rockets heavenward as an emotional d’n’b epic. The collaboration “Final Lap” is similarly teary, touching on trance and footwork before blasting off into an acid jungle climax. It… is… breathtaking. Easily one of the biggest surprises of the year for me.
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The Answer Is In The Beat 