January 18, 2020 at 3:04 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
The Glass Path: Recurring Faces Through The Spiral Of Time LP
All of the sounds heard on this album were sourced from field recordings made in Peru in 2016. They’re hardly recognizable as such, though, as they’re processed through muddy tape loops that make them sound like they’re shivering at the bottom of a well. On a few occasions, such as the brief “Cosntanera”, a remnant of a tune pokes through, in sort of a Caretaker-like fashion, and it sounds like it’s gasping for air. “Llaulipata” sounds like a sputtering airplane flying overhead while diseased birds chirp. “On Train, On High” is a much brighter, more uplifting melodic organ spiral. After that, it gets frigid and unforgiving again. People are busy plowing the streets and snowblowing sidewalks outside right now, and some of this sounds like a disfigured version of that. Then the final track, “Clap In The Oasis”, is another blown out, exhausted distortion of another long-forgotten melody. Super discomforting but really intoxicating.
January 18, 2020 at 2:20 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Local Talent: Higienópolis
Toronto’s James Hill (who is currently touring with BadBadNotGood, and is also a member of Autobahn Trio) leads Local Talent, a jazz trio heavy on atmospheric synths and flowing, spontaneous rhythms. On this brief album, sounds and moods shift from kaleidoscopic daydreams to classical piano introspections; “The Silent Cry” starts out the latter and ends up the former. “Tundra” and “Sailing At Night” are appropriately dusky and/or wintry, but then “Skeletons” is more rousing and colorful, and easily the album’s most exciting track. The somber “Blue Rainbow” showcases Rich Brown’s electric bass playing more than the preceding tracks.
January 16, 2020 at 8:58 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Clandestine Syndicate: Rocket Science EP
While the cover of this EP makes it seem like a collection of smarmy college rock songs for frat boys, surprisingly enough it ends up being four tracks of legitimate electro-techno. “Apache” is a cool blue electro-glide with astronaut transmissions echoing in the background. “Voice Obsession” has more of a playful bounce to it, having fun chopping up a chatty voice over a cruising electro beat. “Drone Gangsta” is a long similar lines, but without as much of a vocal presence, other than the title line. “Cool Thing” is a more Detroit techno-sounding sequel to “Voice Obsession”, and perhaps my favorite track here.
January 12, 2020 at 11:49 am | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Animals Within Animals: We Fail For A Living
Plunderphonic collective Animals Within Animals finally resurfaced last year, encompassing hundreds of years of failure, detritus, and making do with what’s available on the gargantuan, hilarious
We Fail For a Living. Opener “Unlikely Things” arranges a tune out of a clip of someone taking non-musical sounds and talking about making music out of them, essentially doing his job for him. “Trashy Music For Trashy People” is a brief collage based on Oscar the Grouch’s “I Love Trash”, incorporating several other songs and audio clips about trash, and touching on the whole trash art philosophy. “Fresh For 88” is a collage of hip-hop samples which directly reference the year the songs were recorded, starting with BDP and then progressing through the golden age to gangsta to Busta Rhyme’s pre-millenial paranoia, kicking off a Y2K theme which continues through the album. The three-part “Chronological History of the United States” series is absolutely bonkers, smashing together hundreds of suspenseful movie clips, intense dubstep drops, death metal growls, Freddie Mercury a capellas, and loads of profanity into dense pieces of sonic overload. Also, Negativland’s Weatherman warns of impending failure, and there’s a lengthy lecture on “brain warshing” set to waves of industrial noise.
January 5, 2020 at 2:19 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Briain: E-FAX004 12″ EP
Really high quality blend of electro, breaks, and braindance. “Laniakea” immediately comes booming at you in full force, but there’s also subtler, more intricate tracks like “Aisling Sequence” and “It’s Never Enough”. “Truth or Shnare” sort of leans into dubstep as well. Loads of ideas on this one, it’s easy to mix but it has its mentalist moments as well.
December 29, 2019 at 4:43 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Longmont Potion Castle: Tour Line Live
This year, Longmont Potion Castle’s long-awaited documentary finally premiered, and there were screenings in various cities across the U.S. and Canada throughout the year. After each screening, Mr. LPC himself got on the line and answered questions from audience members, in addition to working his phone magic on the fly. This release collects five and a half hours’ worth of live calls from these film screenings, and it gives a little bit more insight into the workings of his mind than the film did. Like when someone asks about the origin of “what y’all doin’ up ‘ere?” and he says that it’s a bastardization of his dad’s accent. Throughout the calls, he’s constantly riddling his voice with Max Headroom-style glitches and dialing in phone numbers covertly, so phone voices randomly pop up mid-conversation. Many of them end up just going straight to voice mail, and at several points he ends up with an outgoing message with a girl singing a parody of “Party in the U.S.A.” instructing the caller to “leave a message anyway”. Of course he ends up contacting a few people who are familiar with his shtick, or play along with him in any case, but they usually end up being as befuddled as usual. He also states that he feels bad for Alex Trebek after the news of his cancer diagnosis, yet he still says “frick it” and calls him a few times anyway (and he sounds really worn out and over it). Even more so than the usual LPC album, there’s a lot of repetition here in terms of the gags he’s trying — lots of calling up meat markets asking for non-meat parts of animals, including blood, skin, and “upchuck”; lots of calling bars or liquor stores and saying he’s going to bring his flexi-straw and sample everything in order to see “which direction I want to go in tonight” — but if you’re a diehard fan, you know you need to hear every second of it. Plus the term “goofy loaf” enters the LPC lexicon. OK touch yourself.
December 25, 2019 at 11:59 am | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Seiho/Matthewdavid: Spore Drive Split EP tape
Hi-definition prismatic beats from two L.A. producers. It’s released on a tape, but it’s far away from being a fragmentary lo-fi vibe-out thing. The five tracks are short but they’re filled with detailed, stuttering beat patterns, diamond-cut glitches, energetic peaks and valleys, and heavy moods. Seiho’s tracks are more futuristic, while Matthewdavid’s end up being some form of new age jungle, with flutes caressing shuffly, organic breakbeats. It’s practically over before it begins but the whole EP is ace.
December 24, 2019 at 5:29 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Hydropark: Circuit 2 LP
The
second LP from Hydropark is somewhere in between a hip-hop beat tape and a
Faust Tapes-style hodgepodge of jump cuts and seemingly random ideas, but the music itself is never as dadaist or chaotic. Instead, it’s a suite of several easygoing synth instrumentals, strong rhythms that dissolve after a few bars, lost riffs, and a few doses of quality synth-rock. It gets hard to keep track of which song is which, so taking the whole trip and playing it straight through is the way to go. Doing so almost feels like the soundtrack to some sort of amusement park ride filled with lights and animatronics which keeps switching directions unexpectedly every minute, except the music is really cool and exciting instead of hokey. Or to put it more succinctly, it’s low attention span Krautrock (think Roedelius and Michael Rother in particular).
December 22, 2019 at 7:49 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Pursuit Grooves: Bess
Vanese Smith’s
latest is inspired by the life story of
Bessie Coleman, the first Black American female pilot. All of the song titles reference her career as an aviator and stuntmaster, and the interludes are recreations of announcements related to her air shows. The theme is entirely appropriate for Pursuit Grooves’ music, which knows no boundaries and can often feel like it’s weightless and flying through air. She always has a fascinating way of assembling broken beat patterns and unconventional basslines, forming tracks that aren’t clearcut or full of straight lines and logical sequences. Here, her unpredictable compositions interpret the feelings of a brave soul determined to live her dreams and achieve what others may deem impossible. “Hair Raising” is incredibly tense: Can I do this? Will this be safe? But then “Lady Bird” is the sublime feeling of being free up in the air, far from any worries or naysayers. “Stand Firm On Wings”, the only lyrical tune, is a self-motivational ode, and tracks like “Cloud Pusher” and “Barnstorming” are where Smith takes flight and demonstrates her skills at creating dazzling, forward-thinking experimental bass tracks. “The French Connect” seems about 75% of the way to being a house track, but sort of teeters close to the edge, leaving out a few beats or a certain sense of swing. It’s definitely danceable, but it’ll keep you on your toes. Later, downtempo tracks like the birdsong-heavy “I’ll Be Fine” and “Yesterday Today Tomorrow” are reflections on past achievements and chances to relax and prepare for the next big flight.
December 15, 2019 at 12:17 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Pepper Mill Rondo: It’s Christmas Time! tape
Last year, Pepper Mill Rondo (Hausu Mountain’s Max and Doug) threw practically the entire internet into a giant sausage grinder for their first tape. Now they’re doing the same thing with the most commercialized holiday of the year, the one that starts two months before it actually happens and is meant to signify an event which probably didn’t happen at this time of year. Adorned with a cover image that appears to be a hybrid of Santa, the Grinch, Jerry Garcia, and a lizard person, this is another 70 minutes of plunderphonic madness which explores pretty much every non-religious aspect of the holiday. “FYI” is a rapidfire glitch collage which interpolates Ryuichi Sakamoto’s “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence”, and “Elf By Myself” alludes to a meme but mainly chops up samples from a Christmas episode of Barney (yes, the purple dinosaur) and “Do They Know It’s Christmas”, particularly Bono’s heartwarming “Thank God it’s them instead of you” line. Continuing the karaoke thread of the duo’s previous tape, this one has jolly renditions of carols and holiday tunes with hacked instrumentals, sounding like some sort of cartoon Christmas special where all the colors are out of wack and deeply contrasting but somehow all of the characters are singing competently and on beat so there’s some semblance of things going the way they’re supposed to. “Humbug” and “Non Disclosure Claus” demonstrate the fine line between holiday cheer and nightmarish chaos, particularly in a family environment, and “The War on Xmas” tackles the “Merry Christmas”/”Happy Holidays” debate (witness a kid saying “Thank you President Trump for letting us say merry Christmas again” and try not to have any nightmares tonight). “Christmas Dinner” uncovers the mystery of figgy pudding, buried underneath shredded children’s choirs and a kid who clearly doesn’t have any dental problems singing “All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth”. There’s also a tribute to Mannheim Steamroller’s Christmas records, which have sold bajillions of copies yet I barely hear anyone talk about them anymore. I pretty much can’t deal with normal Christmas music, only bizarre or deconstructed stuff like the song poem Christmas album or the Illegal Art
Mutated Christmas CD, so this is easily right up my alley and will be a staple of any Christmas broadcasts I ever do from now on.
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The Answer Is In The Beat 