August 25, 2020 at 6:42 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Drumskull: Interlocked
Drumskull’s hard-cracking grime-rave burner “Negative 7” was one of the highlights of Seagrave’s
Fugitive Pieces compilation, and his full-length
Interlocked delivers more of the same type of energy. Without fitting into one category, his music draws from early ’90s jungle and breakbeat hardcore, as well as the formative influences of hardcore punk and golden age rap. “Battle Stations” is smoothly shuffling atmospheric jungle with devastating bass, while “Interlocked” references early Prodigy as well as bleep techno, yet has choppier breaks and a more easygoing vibe than either. “Broken Rinse”, more of a broken beat-style track, is shorter and doesn’t travel as much as other tracks here. “Braincleaner” is another swell combination of relaxing pads and spiraling breaks, pushed along by thumping kicks and blinky oscillations. After the more low-key, minimal “Unarmed Opponent”, “Information Society” is a sublime, carefree deep house joint with a brief sample that may or may not refer to some sort of conspiracy theory. “Restart” recalls the type of dubstep that Hyperdub was known for during the 2000s and early 2010s, with a reggae drum fill and snatch of saxophone popping up over a smooth, sophisticated beat. Lots of promise here, definitely an artist to watch out for.
August 22, 2020 at 3:51 pm | Posted in Reviews | 1 Comment
Stazma: Shapeshifter
Beautifully crafted chaos from French producer Julien Guillot, who has released music on Peace Off, Murder Channel, Acroplane, and lots of other labels.
Shapeshifter, which is NYP on Bandcamp and will eventually be available on vinyl, as a remarkable set of complex, hugely emotional tracks which apply fizzing acid and occasional dubbed-out textures to kinetic, always-alert IDM, and while there’s tracks that explore a more reflective mode, like the almost choral-sounding “Psev”, the producer hasn’t given up mind-battering breakbeats, as the epic “Triton” or the Speak-N-Spell-ified “Compu1” will attest. Really, the best ones here are the once that balance more ponderous moods and subtle details with moments of all-out onslaught, which is the majority of the album. Breakcore and IDM are always going to be extreme niche genres, and especially something like this that’s at the intersection of both, but for those that can get into it, this is some lovely, engrossing stuff. In some ways, it’s as grotesque as the cover art suggests, but don’t expect the bodily function obsession of Otto Von Schirach or the metal/baroque/chicken clucking blender hybrids of Igorrr. This is outlandish and intense but not as obviously wacky or shocking as those artists might come off as.
Stazma: Fluorhydrique EP
(also NYP with hope for a vinyl pressing, someday) is shorter but similarly focused, and maybe a bit more immediate. Drawn-out glitch-breaks that snap back into perfectly orchestrated mayhem, acid drizzles, menacing tension, and a frantic sense of progression are all present in these relatively short but powerful tracks. “Margin” is a diversion into soothing electric robo-dub, made extra slippery by Terminal 11’s remix, and intro track “Jardin Bleep” is a brief moment of spacey signal transmissions, but otherwise there’s hard-hitters like “Blue Screen” and “Defunktional”.
August 21, 2020 at 7:35 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Evil Robot Ted: Lunaclast
Somewhat of a
lost album from Brokecore John, this was mostly recorded in 2017, with the exception of one earlier track and another one that was reworked this year. It’s a mixture of crushed-beat jams, beautiful noise drones, and beautiful noisy breaks. All of it sounds raw, in the moment, and packed with feelings. This is not music that pays attention to trends or tries to outdo anything, it’s just pure expression, and it sounds fantastic. The noise elements are bright and sun-blasted rather than harsh or oppressive, and when there are beats, they’re usually twitchy, breaky, and stuttery rather than dancey or hypnotic. Some of it I can only describe as sounding like charred neon. Magnificent.
August 20, 2020 at 7:16 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Bubblegum Octopus: Big Battles
This is a selection of tracks that Matthew Morden wrote for Battle of the Bits, an online chip music competition based in Detroit but including participants from around the world. They aren’t properly arranged BGO songs with vocals and hooks and the like, they’re more like instrumental MIDI demos, but they’re every bit as complex, twisted, and blindingly fast as his usual work, and their sheer creativity and virtuosity puts a hell of a lot of other musicians to shame. Opener “Tough Guys’ Club” is a demented fusion of jazz-core and triple-speed city pop, and “Lake Gusts” is something like sparkly magic forest drill’n’bass. “Ark” is not battle music at all, more like something to soundtrack a calmer transitional scene, possibly one filled with some dialogue, but also exploring. Other tracks start out strange and confusing in one way and then suddenly switch into hyper-break combat mode with no warning — just watch your guard during “Dumper Robo 2026”. “Outdoor Fridge” (awesome) is the most overtly 8-bit-sounding track here, but if it had been composed 30 years ago, someone would’ve thought their Game Boy was slightly malfunctioning. The
Bandcamp download also includes MIDI files of several tracks, should you happen to find a use for them.
August 18, 2020 at 7:45 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Somatic Responses: Explorer // Stayin’ home vol 2
Somatic Responses have been taking advantage of the lockdown and social distancing, using the time to work on even more music, and unleash older unreleased material. This is the
second Stayin’ Home release, although like the first, it appears to be a Paul Healy solo work. Like much of their recent work, it blends advanced modular synth arrangements with blasted breakbeats, sticking to the drum’n’bass/breakcore mood for much of it, while still having more of a live jam feel than much music in these genres. There’s other directions explored, though, such as the suspenseful signal calls of the aptly titled “B Movie”, the horror electro of “Sanctuary in Chaos”. or the crystalline acid of “Zenith”. But most importantly there’s just a bunch of straight-up slammers like “Cold Overlap” and “Proton Breaks”. And there’s a gorgeous 12-minute ambient track at the end. Don’t know about you, but I definitely have not been this productive and creative during COVID-19.
August 16, 2020 at 2:51 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
XBass: Second Bass
Longtime Bay B Kane collaborator XBass released this 21-track monolith on
Bandcamp back in May. The Ruff Guidance label’s
Bandcamp houses dozens of releases dating back to the halcyon mid-’90s, and as with a lot of the newer jungle coming out, it can be hard to tell exactly when it was produced, as so much of it updates the classic elements of jungle and drum’n’bass. This one dips into a bunch of different modes: the atmospheric roller “She Walks”, the hip-hop drum’n’bass of “Friend or Foe”, the tear-out ragga-jungle of “Can’t Stop the Mission”, “Rude Bwoy Forever”, “The Last Junglist”… and just to cut to the chase, there’s plenty of tracks with obscenely huge, roughed up breaks that just trample over everything like elephants. “Dan in the Blues”, “You’re Missing”, “Night Worker”, “Roots and Culture”, “Young Blood”, all guaranteed heavyweight sound system killers. Nuff respect!!
August 15, 2020 at 2:53 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
REQ & Smudge: Smudge’s Coffee
Former warp signee REQ recently started making music again thanks to inspiration from his close friend Smudge, whoever that may be. The original tracks on
this EP owe way more to early ’80s beatbox electro than any trend that’s been excavated recently, with midtempo cavernous booming beats and lo-bit samples tapped out furiously. “Change le Beat” obviously alludes to the ffffffresh 1982 Celluloid classic, and makes the melody a bit more dazed and spangly. The Fear Ratio’s mix of “Smudge’s Coffee” is as Skam-sounding as one might expect, pumping in some breakbeats but largely keeping things stripped down and steady. Best of all is the ETCH remix, which has some heavier bass pressure and tougher breaks, sounding a bit more futuristic than the other tracks. Very excited to hear that ETCH has signed to Moving Shadow, glad to hear one of the leaders of the new jungle/hardcore scene be recognized by the originators.
August 13, 2020 at 7:15 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Tomotsugu Nakamura: Literature
from a Tokyo-based artist who arranges acoustic sounds into a series of soft but snapping glitch melodies. Gentle acoustic guitars are made to sound much bigger and more resonant without much in the way of effects, just very careful, deliberate editing. “Copenhagen” is one of the most tuneful pieces here, assembling a staccato but smoothly flowing rhythm and making the vibrations and slides as deeply felt as the melodies. Other tracks like “Along Together” find just as much beauty in sounds overlapping, mismatching, and breaking down. Comparison-wise, this somewhat reminds me of the astounding
Dorine_Muraille album from 2003, except far less dense and fast-moving, and without vocals. It’s just an incredibly lovely album which feels like a series of refracted views of simple but breathtaking nature scenes.
August 9, 2020 at 1:24 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Ron Zakrin: Wait for Tomorrow
Detroit painter and musician follows 2017’s
One in a Million with a more sprawling set of retro-futuristic electro and techno-pop tracks. First and foremost,
this album is worth hearing because Zakrin wrote a bouncy italo-disco style song about
BurgerTime, which might be the best oldschool arcade game ever made. Not the easiest, that’s for sure, but absolutely one of the funnest, and the song matches the silliness and jovial spirit of the game. Aside from that, we have songs like “Storm the Ramparts” which are kind of tough and militant but also kind of playful. Like it’s a bit too cartoonish to really feel threatened by. And then others like “Cyber Boulevard” and “Beyond the Milkyway” are just fun and delightful space disco mini-journeys. “Slow Command” and “Cosmic Swamp Ass” are slower and much lengthier, and require more patience, but they both travel to some distant, fascinating worlds. Then at the end of it all, he channels Skint-style big beat with the chunky, lo-bit breakbeat-driven kung fu crime caper “Revenge”.
August 8, 2020 at 2:58 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Renegade Android: Downtown
Renegade Android has been releasing IDM/breakcore hybrids on various netlabels since the late ’90s, and his
new album finds him returning to D-Trash, which put out his first album in 1999. The tracks are all short and filled with glitchy/grindy beats and simple innocent/angry melodies, and they all refreshingly sound cut from the cloth of breakcore’s original lo-bit Amiga aesthetic rather than the more hi-definition direction some of the genre’s bigger names have gone in. No giant, glowing modular systems here. Instead, there’s fast, twitchy hyper-jigs like “Flailing Extremities”, which requires way too much caffeine to accurately dance to, but has a kind of cute melody behind it. “Malfunctioned Robby Robot” does in fact sound like something a little plastic droid with worn-out, defective circuits would try to dance to. “Obvious Threat” has some of the biggest, most destructive breaks here, and it’s one of the funnest tracks. “Swords and Daggers” is even more massive, and easily the most ambitious production on the album. Simply jaw-dropping. The album ends with a remix by Venetian Snares, but it doesn’t come close to overshadowing the preceding tracks, it’s more of a brief ambient coda, riddled with thin, chattering noise textures which end up devouring the track at the end.
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The Answer Is In The Beat 