The Answer Is In The Beat

Breakbeat Heartbeat: Better, Lost (self-released, 2020)

December 18, 2020 at 7:20 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

I’m not sure how I’ve never heard of Breakbeat Heartbeat before, but she’s been releasing albums since the late 2000s. I can’t even remember how I came across her latest album either, but it’s a melancholy but charming fusion of wistful indie-electronic and chipbreak. The 8-bit melodies and textures are there, but the songs don’t feel like they’re contained inside a tiny box with an LCD screen. There’s lush acoustic guitar melodies and a few driving pop-punk bits, a little like Anamanaguchi but mostly instrumental. Likewise, the breaks kind of creep up subtly rather than recklessly piledrive over everything. It’s just a really nice mix of delicate dynamics, pretty melodies, sad feelings, and jungle-esque breaks in a decidedly non-jungle context. The last song is even in a sort of waltz tempo and has lilting strings. Mega-lovely.

v/a: Moxie Presents Vol. 5 (On Loop, 2020)

December 15, 2020 at 9:01 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Longtime NTS regular Moxie has been presenting compilations of forward-thinking underground dance music since 2014, with artists including Violet, DJ Python, Ikonika, SCNTST, and so many more. Volume 5 just arrived last month, and it’s a tantalizing set of various broken beat and club flavors. The first two tracks, by Yu Su and Al Wootton respectively, are both quite lush and dubby, with Wootton’s landing closer to garage. rRoxymore’s “Soleil Synthétique” starts out with steely breaks and gets much sunnier and housier, with some ear-tickling keyboard soloing near the end. Ronan & Teleself’s “Ocular Reflex” is the type of electro that doesn’t feel entirely trapped in the grid, thanks to its breakbeats and dubbed-out vocals. Ciao’s “Vibra (Fran’s Deep Mix)” comes closest to sounding like a vintage Transmat or Metroplex 12″, but with just enough of a modern touch. Pursuit Grooves’ “This Concentrated” is off-center house with a nimble bassline and unique touches like rainstick-sounding percussion. System Olympia’s “Miya Says” is a mellow house cruiser which just radiates blissful vibes, and briefly flashes back to electro-funk during its breakdown.

v/a: Evident Ware (Sneaker Social Club, 2020)

December 13, 2020 at 4:38 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Sneaker Social Club’s newest compilation is a testament to hardcore and jungle’s longevity over more than three decades, and while it isn’t a definitive survey of everyone making waves in this genre at the moment, there’s still a wealth of outstanding material to be heard. The best tracks here push breakbeat choppage as far as it can go while still being recognizable as club music, while also adding something unique. Etch’s “Monoxide” is super obtuse but still funky, and Egyptian producer ZULI folds some Arabic rapping into “3ankaboot”. DJ Guy’s remix of Manix’s classic “Special Request” actually de-emphasizes the hardcore and is more of a smooth, slightly dubby house cruiser. Christoph De Babalon takes things fra beyond the dancefloor into the realm of surreal cosmic horror with “Where Are You Going?” Clouds’ “Can’t Anticipate” isn’t as jungle as some of their other stuff, it’s more of a noisy club track with a beat that skips along and some damaged breaks in there. The Forest Drive West track has some heavy breaks, but it mainly seems to float in a void. Dream Cycle’s “ESP” is a bit more lush and bassy, but a little fried and burnt out. Ashford Knights’ “Sinkhole” moves from craggy breakbeats to bleeps and crystalline electro, then slaps ’em together. Soundbwoy Killah’s “Something Special” is halfway between breakbeat hardcore and speed garage, with time-stretched vocals and mutant bass as well as spinbacks. After that, there’s further winners from Konx-om-Pax, Hooverian Blur, and especially Anz, who mixes Outlander-style rave with dubstep and then accelerates into jungle at the very end.

Mystified: Yenisei Crossing (Spotted Peccary Music, 2020)

December 10, 2020 at 8:03 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Thomas Park has almost 400 releases listed on Discogs as Mystified, and dozens more under his own name and as Mister Vapor, Autocad, and other monikers. This is an hour of detached industrial loops and concrete soundscapes which has little in common with the cosmic electronic and new age releases typically put out by Spotted Peccary. Created using a generative computer program he developed with Python programming code, the album features a lot of loops, waves, flagpole clangs, and other sounds layered on top of each other, usually not in sync, but somehow making some sort of sense together. Several of the tracks have evenly paced 4/4 beats, but this almost seems like it happened by accident, as they’re barely tethered to the drones and other sounds. It might be disorienting to some, but I think it sounds rather soothing, so it makes some sort of sense appearing on an ambient/new age label. There’s a lot of common sounds used throughout the tracks, so it seems beside the point to pick out highlights. It’s just a really good set of sounds to sleepwalk to.

Smurphy: Spheres of Consciousness (Bokeh Versions, 2020)

December 4, 2020 at 7:21 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Now apparently without Upgrayedd in front of her name anymore, Smurphy resurfaces on Bokeh Versions with a brief but fiery EP benefitting Eden Reforestation Projects. From the start, she constructs choppy footwork-esque beats with blips of Casio percussion and super relaxed synth pads. “Growth” is similarly lush yet rough, with timestretched ragga-jungle vocals and an aired-out Jersey bounce, and even a hint of bhangra, at least to my ears. “Instinct” is much more abstract, with rapid, spluttery noises giving way to “Dooms Night”-style bass and more aggressively cut-up drums, and pitched-up vocals floating up like bubbles (and a dolphin near the very end). “Intellect” is another footwork-y track that stretches a handful of vocal samples up against throbbing kicks, throws in a pinch of minimal techno, and actually still sounds kind of chilled out somehow. “Intuition” hits that sweet spot between hyperkinetic footwork and jungle/hardcore, although it’s not quite as atmospheric as the latter. Anyway, really strong EP of hybrid sounds and unpredictable samples.

Fred Thomas: Dream Erosion (Synthesizer Songs) (Life Like, 2020)

December 2, 2020 at 8:22 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Fred Thomas’ gorgeous new solo album under his own name is surprisingly not one of his singer-songwriter releases, but an instrumental album focusing on synth-based pieces. It’s not quite an ambient album, since “Non-Romantic Light Rail Ribbon-Cutting Ceremony” has drums, and ends up being closer to mellower Hydropark. “Backstroke” has pretty melodies damaged by tape effects and splattery effects that sound like fireworks, and “Sonar” is mostly peaceful and kind of melancholy, with a few moments where it smudges or otherwise seems slightly interrupted. Other pieces like “Kitchen” reach out to the stars, and some absolutely glimmer, including one actually called “Glimmer”. After the more rhythmic “Emphasis Reduction Training Manual” drifts away, the album ends with “That Summer”, a sweet lullaby with vibraphone by Mary Fraser.

Nahash: Flowers of the Revolution (SVBKVLT, 2020)

December 2, 2020 at 7:33 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

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.

Sandy Ewen: You Win LP (Gilgongo, 2020)

December 1, 2020 at 7:43 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

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).

Richard Devine: Systik (BL_K Noise, 2020)

December 1, 2020 at 6:31 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

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.

patten: Aegis (555-5555, 2020)

November 30, 2020 at 9:00 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

I haven’t gotten around to checking out all the recent patten releases yet, but thankfully I did give Aegis a listen because it’s amazing. This is one of his more beat-driven efforts, and the tracks all refract a number of different club styles and meld them into something new. “Heat Loss” is a particularly sharp-edged grime track which is filled with abrupt double-takes and fragmented voices, while trance synths form a mist around it all. “Cloak” is sort of like an industrial-gqom robot march, gradually becoming more hallucinatory as the distortion grows and more dislocated voices are added to the mix. A thick, wavy bassline calmly levitates throughout the fractal chaos of “Gravity Bond”. “Drip” is faster and more of a battle scene, and eventually the frantic beats disappear, leaving a marsh of corrupted static. “Optics” has an almost straightforward club beat, but still feels tripped up by 8-bit glitches and modulations. Like a lot of tracks on this album, it comes back stronger during its second half, constantly pushing more sounds into the mix. “Goo”‘s bassline doesn’t change much throughout the track, which starts out light and somewhat chirpy at the beginning, but absolutely growls by the end, making the bass seem to carry so much lumber behind it. “Vertigo” brings back some of the captured voices that haunted earlier songs, and it has one of the album’s softer melodies, which seems to glow in a cool, dark shade of blue.