February 6, 2022 at 3:01 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Tim Reaper: Hardcore & Rubble
Just weeks after delivering his first
Essential Mix (though every single one of his mixes are truly essential), Tim Reaper just dropped a record on
Sneaker Social Club. “Outer Realms” has oldskool darkside breaks and thick, cloudy atmospherics, just a beautiful hardcore potion that keeps on flowing. “Heavy Duty” is way more sci-fi with a slight ragga edge, and the breakdown where it feels like staring into the cosmos is truly gorgeous. “Agony Tonight” eases into ragga with some smoother dancehall/lovers rock sounding vocals, and simmers but doesn’t boil over. “Bulletproof” has fast, trippy breaks and a brief sample telling you to “bring a bulletproof vest”. It skips and glimmers, sounding excited but plagued by a fear that won’t go away.
February 5, 2022 at 12:30 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Kaizo Slumber: The Kaizo Manifesto
‘s glitched-out footwork was pretty remarkable, but the producer has come into their own with this new album as
Kaizo Slumber. Lush, flowing atmospheric rave melodies and pianos joined with ecstatic breaks, and some more aggressive banging kicks in all the right places. There’s a bit of a dystopian theme to this, making it seem a little harder than the usual neo-rave effort, but it’s still a hugely joyous release that isn’t making a grand attempt at sounding cool or trendy. There’s bits that sound a little like Scooter or the more aggressive side of ’90s action movie electronica or donk, but all folded into this specific aesthetic. It all feels like a massive spontaneous rave outside a nuclear reactor, except there’s only like 5 people there, but the music is so loud and so fast that the speakers appear 10 times bigger than they are.
February 4, 2022 at 8:50 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
CDR: Live at Knot 2021.12.15
CDR is quite possibly the most prolific breakcore producer of all time, with over
500 releases to his credit and growing. While some of his releases have seemed formulaic in the past (anime samples + looped Amen breaks + assloads of distortion = check, done, upload to Soulseek or Bandcamp now), he’s also created some powerful work that clearly took a lot of effort. Some of the stuff he was releasing on ADAADAT a few years ago fell into the latter category, and
this recent live album might even be better than that. Easing off on the distortion a bit, but still wielding some killer breaks, this is a continuous flow of junglistic breakcore that just keeps heading deeper and deeper down the rabbithole. He hasn’t done lush, hypnotic melodies like this in the past, and the beats seem a little on the same tip as current jungle revival stuff, but by the third track it’s clear that this is messed up enough to come from a veteran of the breakcore scene. His music has simply never sounded this pretty before, nor has it ever gotten this heady and emotional. “Knot 06” is a standout, starting out sounding like a remix of Grimes’ “Genesis” before crashing into a chiptune melody. Then there’s ethereal choirs floating through the next track only to be demolished by an onslaught of noisy glitch. Fucking amazing. This is why I still listen to breakcore 25 years after discovering DHR. Highest recommendation.
February 2, 2022 at 6:11 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Christopher Parker & the Band of Guardian Angels: Soul Food
Pianist Christopher Parker leads this
all-star assembly on a nourishing quest with no earthly boundaries. The lineup includes wind multi-instrumentalist Daniel Carter, trumpeter Jaimie Branch, bassist William Parker, and drummer Gerald Cleaver, in addition to vocalist Kelley Hurt, who plays with both Parkers in Dopolarians, and also collaborated with Christopher on 2020’s
No Tears Suite, written about the Little Rock Nine. While that album clearly had a story and a message behind it, this one is more of a melding of forces and cluster of energies than anything else. Hurt’s vocals are amorphous and interpretive rather than lyrical, and the rest of the band similarly pushes, pulls, and spills out, freely expressing themselves rather than running through melodies or follow straightforward rhythms. “Guardian Angels” is the most immediately gripping piece here, with William Parker sounding like he’s sawing out the innards of his bass, and the rest of the musicians sort of pushing in the same direction, but also moving in their own paths. The proceedings do get a little messy, and later into the album, it does get to the point where it’s hard to tell if the musicians are actually in the same room, paying attention to each other’s playing. Christopher Parker’s piano playing stands out, getting quite rollicking at some points. Hurt curiously seems to disappear from the studio for a while, although she resurfaces on the final track.
February 1, 2022 at 8:59 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
bye2: Teeth Restoration
Separated by short ambient “prayer” interludes, most of the tracks on
bye2’s latest album are stunning, prismatic neo-rave diamonds cut into lustrous shapes which reflect in countless directions. It’s hard to think of neo-rave music contorted as much as “Chao Dialysis”, which has hard-to-count time sigs, yet it’s still highly fun and danceable. “Kotu Tavsan” has whomping bass and slashing breaks, then flips into souped-up 4/4 thumps and glitched-out dancehall vocals, with some more break choppage and CeCe Peniston samples thrown into the rave. There’s a few other obvious early ’90s dance samples on the album, but it’s not as much of a nostalgia trip (however many generations removed, I doubt this producer was born before the late ’90s) as it might seem. “Reverse Nightmare Tower” has a unique way of flipping dark, lo-bit garage into crystal-drenched electro into glowing neo-rave with grime samples. “Wheel of Fate” is more of an epic battle in an arcade, and the closing “prayer7” is a breezy, shimmering electro-glide which sounds easy even with its broken time sig.
January 31, 2022 at 8:33 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
VTSS: Projections EP
is far from the industrial techno she’s often known for, though it is caustic and heavy. “The need to avoid” starts out almost like warped dancehall before exploding with frantic breaks. “For your safety” is brittle and jittery, somewhere between footwork and glitchy IDM, but with a smooth atmosphere elevating it. Ultimately it is definitely dance music more so than head music, but works as both. “Live laugh leave” is more intensely blown out not-quite-dancehall with splintering, erratic beats. “Propaganda of success” creeps and lurches, then donks you over the head with gabber kicks. “Why we don’t deserve nice things” seems a little less intense than the other tracks, but still rustles and bubbles over with feverish anticipation. The EP is short but dense, and highly impressive.
January 27, 2022 at 6:55 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Phil Ranelin: Infinite Expressions
82-year-old trombonist Phil Ranelin, founder of Detroit’s legendary Tribe collective, recorded
his latest album in September 2020 after several months of pandemic-induced isolation. It took some effort and soul searching to be able to work with other musicians again, but it was worth it, as this session clearly shows. The title of the first song namechecks Eric Dolphy as a guiding inspiration, and it continues in that adventurous realm. The recording sounds live and spontaneous, with Ranelin’s trombone perhaps a little distanced in the mix, or perhaps he’s not playing as loudly as some of the other musicians. Carlos Niño contributes fluttering, sparkling percussion alongside Andre Beasley’s drumming, while Hideaki Tokunaga plays nuanced electric and acoustic guitars and Michael Alvidrez and Ian Martin play acoustic bass on certain tracks. “Infinite Expressions” eventually gets the furthest out, while “In the Time Being” feels more relaxed, intimate, and acoustic, but not mellow. “In Time with the Times” is a more abstract, amorphous 15-minute suite, while the more compact “Blues for Paula” has more of a ragged New Orleans swing to it. “Weaver of Dreams” is a short, ruminative solo piece, and then “One More Blues” is a peppy solo melody that’s barely 30 seconds long.
January 25, 2022 at 7:41 pm | Posted in Reviews | 1 Comment
Nubdug Ensemble: Volume 2: Blame
The
second Nubdug Ensemble release is another 20-minute prog-jazz-pop nugget made up of accessible songs with knotty time signatures. Opener “Blues” has the longest lyric sheet and seems hookier than the other songs, but the lyrics are generally poetic, industrious, and a little philosophical. Amanda Chaudhary’s magic touch is felt on the synth-heavy “Bleep” and “Blaze”. “Blaze” is especially mind-blowing, progressing from an interstellar synth odyssey to a playful jazz-rock fantasia. “Block” shows that the group can put aside tricky time signatures and just lay down a heavy dance groove, with shuffling drums and gargantuan funk bass setting the pace for freewheeling sax solos by Steve Adams of Rova.
January 24, 2022 at 7:59 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
John Beltran: The Peninsula
Michigan’s John Beltran
presents an EP that evokes the expansiveness of the upper part of the state rather than the concrete roughness of the Detroit metro area. “Begin Again” is colored by light, shuffling percussion which floats across the auburn sky without settling down. “Peninsula” has an intricately webbed percussion pattern which trickles along with delicate synth pads which breathe softly. “Miss the Colors” has a faint rattle rather than a beat, and the constant loops of eerie, apparition-like voices give way to a denser formation of sounds and more fluttering pulsations. “Une belle matinée” is more of a soothing, playful Balearic house tune, with lightly elastic bass and cool woodwinds. It’s very much a dance track to cool off to at sunset, but it’s busier than it seems. After the sun has fully gone down, the EP ends with a Luke Hess remix of the first track, which retains a sense of detachment from the original but affixes a more straightforward club beat and some 303 acid tweaks.
January 23, 2022 at 4:38 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Martha Skye Murphy & Maxwell Sterling: Distance On Ground
What starts out sounding like an ethereal float in the clouds ends up being an unexpectedly dark, distorted trip through some unexplored corners of your mind. It’s basically some sort of psychological drama in the form of two drone compositions around 10 minutes each. “93.3 km” is especially gripping, with a psychedelic swirl beginning and more suspenseful melodies, as well as some ear-catching edits and effects. The artists
explain that this came out of periods where Martha was in a wordless trance for hours, and it truly seems to follow a logic that doesn’t correspond with verbal language.
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