February 20, 2022 at 5:29 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Grandmaster Masese: s/t LP
A few years ago, Grandmaster Masese released
a single displaying his mastery of the Obokano (a giant eight-stringed lyre from Kenya), recorded right on the street with crowd noise audible. His
new album is a studio recording featuring musicians such as Dave Sharp and Mike List, as well as production by Dr. Pete Larson. It comes closer to the psychedelic rock sound of Larson’s Cytotoxic Nyatiti Band, with atmospheric synths and blazing guitars snaking around the buzzing Obokano and complex polyrhythms. The sound is a mixture of cosmic swirling and sharp twanging, with something approaching a refracted Latin jazz style on “Orogena”, and it’s all intoxicating.
February 18, 2022 at 6:46 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Robbie Lee & Lea Bertucci: Winds Bells Falls
On
this album, Robbie Lee played woodwinds, celeste, and tubular chimes, while Lea Bertucci manipulated Lee’s playing in real time using reel-to-reel tape machines. The pieces with celeste sound like lullabies morphing into feverish hallucinations, sometimes doing playful loop-de-loops and other times drifting far past your eyelids into the haunted side of the night, as on the 8-minute creeper “Bags, Boxes, and Bubbles”. “Division Music” is apparently played on a gemshorn, which is in the ocarina family, but it sounds like a choir of radioactive owls playing some sort of hide and seek game. “Azimuth” is similar but even rawer, stretching the sounds of a contrabass recorder out to 11 minutes, and also coming as close to free jazz as this album gets. “Somebody Dream” is just a short, pleasant bit of peppermint candy to send you off into slumberland.
February 17, 2022 at 5:43 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Disaster Relief: Back Into It LP
Ann Arbor’s Disaster Relief don’t specify if their album title is supposed to mean “put your back into it” or “get back into it”, but it could have either meaning. It’s their
first album in 3 years, of course following the halting of live shows due to the pandemic. Besides that, it’s just super funky, danceable, vibe-heavy music. Lead by Darrin James, this album’s lineup of Disaster Relief also features Dan Bennett of Afrobeat fusionists NOMO and synth-funk mystery man Josef Deas. It has a similar blend of jazz, funk, and Afrobeat, but there’s also a Greek wedding dance, “Kalamatianós for Alexander”, and the complex polyrhythms of the highlife-ish “Beach Song”. “Ostinato Eleven” also has tricky time signatures yet doesn’t seem challenging or obtuse. Worth mentioning is the fact that the group also recently collaborated with Detroit living legend Thornetta Davis on a
bluesy single.
February 16, 2022 at 6:50 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Applesauce Tears: Scores
The mysterious, strangely named Applesauce Tears have essentially functioned as Black Moth Super Rainbow’s southern cousins for the past decade or so, frequently releasing trippy electronic post-rock records which sound vividly psychedelic but also immensely comforting.
This album finds the group at their most cinematic, like the title suggests, with strings, flutes, horns, and occasional choral vocals and incidental speech joining the usual assortment of cheap keyboards (one even has a stuck F# key) and found sounds. The group seemingly pull from psychedelic Beatles arrangements as well as lush spaghetti western soundtracks, with touches of trip-hop (“Personal Winter”, “Brass Model”) and dream pop (“Rainy Day Face”). “More Secret Joys and Sorrows” melds all of it together, with a ticking downtempo beat, truly swooning strings, and spirited claps stirring up some heady emotions. After the melodramatic interlude “City Seen”, the album wraps up with “On the Possibility of Being Useful”, a hazy mini-suite with serenading strings, almost “Purple Rain” vibes, and steady, country-ish drumming which cuts out when the music gets too dramatic to be contained by rhythm.
February 13, 2022 at 4:46 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Prolaps: Ultra Cycle Pt. 4: Hibernal Death
We’ve reached
the end of Prolaps’ seasonal cycle, and this is a bleak, ugly, massive 2-hour slab of disorienting music about death and rebirth. It starts out with a long, slow industrial sludge metal opening, gradually jamming in some jagged guitar riffs, then evolving through loopy rhythms and briefly flashing back to the 2016 clown scare. It gets breaky but winding and discordant rather than fun and ravey, dipping in a few more metal elements here and there without going full on metal. “Death Tones” is a perverse, cartoonish dub escapade incorporating tortured baby screaming and acid-soaked samples of one of those early Korn songs where he sounds like the Tasmanian Devil. Yet it emerges from all this torment wobbly but still on its feet, bouncing along to techno beats and maintaining some sort of motivation to keep driving forward. The second side starts off much slower but hops up to a faster, haunted pulse for “Fun E-Real Procession”. Beats don’t always stick around, though; they end up dissolving into swamp gas by the end of the 11-minute “7 Years”. Finally, it all piles up in a panic-filled washing machine cycle and gets whisked away in thick smoke clouds, with voices and stunted chords dispersing but not entirely letting go until it’s finally cut off at the end.
February 12, 2022 at 4:27 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Longmont Potion Castle: 19
You talkin’ bout your flip child, you buckwild. Talkin’ bout your stepchild, he buckwild. Talkin’ like you buckwild, you flip child. Talkin’ bout your buck child, you flip wild. Talkin’ bout your whip child, you buck wild. Talkin’ like you buckwild, you flip child. Talkin’ like you flip child, you flip wild. Talkin’ like you flip wild, you buck wild. Talkin’ like you whip wild, you flip child. Talkin’ like a flip child, you stepchild. Talkin’ like you’re buckwild, you buck child. Talkin’ like you flip wild, you flip wild. Talkin’ like you’re buck child, you flip wild. Talkin’ like you flip wild, you flip child.
There’s other good moments on here, like the juice gas and the tranquilized chupacabra, and the rainy day ’70s drama theme, and Downtown Digital Destruction. But everything pales in the face of Dr. Sheba’s brand new smash hit that’s all over the radio, but apparently missing from all the hip record stores in town because they mainly stock old music. The true spiritual successor to Dougan Nash’s seminal classic “Check, Double Check, Triple Check Check”, “Flipwild” is a similarly catchy mind-teaser that just keeps elevating to a higher plane the longer its lyrics spiral around and subtly change. Get in on it now before it slowly pervades popular culture over the course of the next few decades. You won’t be able to find it at your local record shop, because they’re clueless (except for the one superfan who starts playing along), but D.U. has everything you need.
February 10, 2022 at 8:18 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Tommy the Cat: Cosmik Connection 12″ EP
Dutch producer Tommy the Cat runs the label Cat in the Bag and has released split EPs with Tim Reaper, FFF, Coco Bryce, and other heavy hitters in the current jungle scene. This is his first release on Unknown to the Unknown, and it has a sly, beat-forward style that only sparingly uses other elements. “Flying Papers” has rattling breaks and some swift jungle bass, but besides that, it’s just a soft mist of shadowy synth that somehow makes the beats seem quieter than they are. “At the Yard” also makes you focus on the echoing whoops and softly rippling synths rather than the rambunctious breaks. “In Your Eyes” kicks out the heavy yet taut Amen breaks, keeping it sparse otherwise, but suspenseful. “We Will Stay Together in the Dark” has more involved beat programming, chopping up multiple breaks, and its slowly blooming synths make it sink deeper into the light.
February 9, 2022 at 8:09 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Matthew Mercer: Ataxia
The
newest album from long-active electronic musician Matthew Mercer is a techno record through and through, but he devises some truly uncommon textures that other producers might not necessarily think to make dance music out of. “Paralalia” has strange, mutated sounds that nearly sound like distorted voices, all rippling underneath a steady, upfront kick drum. “Parabolia” is a bit of a flashback to his microhouse days, at least at first, but then it becomes much more resonant and cinematic than most minimal techno, additionally bearing a trace of shoegazey feedback. “Aphasia” seems like it’s going to settle into dubby clanging, but it gets interrupted by a violent electric storm, twice. “Revok” does a lot with some disorienting tones, a sort of sideways kick, and some chugging bass.
Ataxia isn’t quite wired the same way as most dance music, but it does serve that purpose, and in any case it’s superbly, inventively crafted.
February 8, 2022 at 8:09 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Casper Mcfadden: medicalmechanica
Just in time for Casper Mcfadden to drop
a new album tomorrow, I’m getting around to reviewing
his last one, which is still only 2 months old (and there’s also an
album of demos that came out in between the two). He’s mega prolific, but I always look forward to everything new he puts out because there’s just so much energy and creativity to what he does. Most of the tracks are only a minute or two and they all run together in an explosive, giddy rush. It’s highly playful and decidedly lo-fi, but it rarely seems tossed off or jokey. Mostly it’s just fun and chaotic, especially tracks like “midnight marauders” and “ydrahde”.
February 7, 2022 at 8:57 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
RAVETRX: Tribe Sequence
on Sherelle’s label is a debut release that instantly leaves a huge impression. “Feel the Way” smashes its way in with some demolishing Amen breaks and a memorable sample. Then “EEEEEE” is stomping industrial techno with playful yeah-woos and some more breakbeats and Detroit techno chords patched in. Plus it’s structured so suspensefully. “Feels Good Inside” is a stompy rave belter with guest producer Mani Festo, also balancing thumps with breaks, and it tucks some acid in there. “Facebook Karen” and “Tyson’s Fury” are similarly relentless no-nonsense techno, also with nods to rave. Finally, “Tribe Sequence Calling” barrels along with less jungle/breakbeat influence than the others, but lets out some sampled diva wailing at the end. Really hard, awesome EP that takes elements of early ’90s techno and just streamlines them and bangs them out.
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The Answer Is In The Beat 