The Answer Is In The Beat

Longmont Potion Castle: 15 (D.U. Records, 2018)

June 23, 2018 at 8:20 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

The biggest addition to the LPC canon from this new album is definitely the part at the end of “LPC 15 Medley” when he calls up a record store and asks for some country song that goes “Where’d ya gitcha donkey donkey?” with tons of wet echo effects on his voice. It’s like a long lost Western cousin of Dougan Nash’s hit “Check, Double Check, Triple Double Check” and it’s the new hit sweeping the nation. It’s all over the radio now. Besides that, someone keeps calling up all these bookstores and hardware stores and asking for hedge clippings and books about egg nog and wart hogs. And trains keep going by and birds keep chirping. Also, the way LPC keeps pronouncing “card” and “charge” is mindblowing. And when he’s doing his UPS guy shtick, claiming he’s from fleagenie.com, and asks someone for a “long number that begins with a four”…. I lost it. One of the album’s bonus tracks is the most revealing thing to appear on an LPC recording so far. There’s a Q&A with people from a record store where he demonstrates his process on the fly. He gets asked if he’d ever want to appear on Jeopardy and he calls Alex Trebek up and asks about casting information. Also he says he’s spoken to Alex between 600 and 700 times. Also, he calls Andy Breckman who tells him to go screw himself. Too perfect.

Color Plus: Regular Energy + TOWMIX01 tape (Towhead, 2018)

June 23, 2018 at 2:21 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

The EP Color Plus released on Vanity Press last year was way too slept on. The Brooklyn producer has loads of other releases, though, including these 2 new ones on his own label. Regular Energy is his first CD, and it’s a set of hyped-up club tracks with heavy but skeletal rhythms embellished with breaking glass, turntable scratches, crowd chants, and some melodic textures on a few tracks, such as the ambient fizzling on “Ut”. Sometimes the beats slow down and approach trap territory, like on the Girl Unit-esque “456 Fatality”, but others are faster club versions of trap’s percussive elements. Some powerful club ammo right here.

Of course, while Color Plus constructs some deadly club tools which are exciting enough to listen to on their own, his work shines best in the mix. Just witness one of his live sets. Or take a listen to TOWMIX01 which you can download for free on Bandcamp. Way more of a journey than his CD, this one winds album tracks (and Acemo collab “Da Back” from the Vanity Press EP) through tracks by DJ NJ Drone, Izy, Kanyon and others. Each track gets about 2 minutes before rushing into the next, so it’s always moving from one rush to another. And yet it’s not absolute sensory overload, or like a contest to cram as many tracks in as possible. It has a natural, logical flow to it. The first side dips into a couple of trap songs, and around the beginning of the second side, it gets into more of a basement rave vibe. The tracks seem to bleed into each other more, creating a feeling of unity but not monotony, but it’s also a bit choppier and scratchier. Also, just want to say that the “bite marks” sound effect that pops up every so often makes me smile.

Turning Jewels Into Water: Which Way Is Home? 12″ EP (FPE Records, 2018)

June 21, 2018 at 12:20 am | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Percussionist Ravish Momin and Haitian turntablist Val Jeanty (aka Val-Inc) present a brief but potent EP of broken rhythms and lost afterlife transmissions. With eerie voices asking existentialist questions and diced up on a turntable, and heavy, unsteady beats booming on top, this sounds like the ’90s WordSound illbient scene updated for the era of footwork, Principe Discos, and Nyege Nyege Tapes. Not coincidentally, two producers from the latter label remixed the title track, although one of the mixes is digital-only. Slikback’s remix reminds me of Addison Groove’s juke/dubstep crossover tracks from nearly a decade ago. “Lights Below the Water” houses fractured earth rhythms, and “Vishwas” is an absolutely heavy bass killer, shaking right down to the foundation and responding with snapping snares and dubbed-up b-boy chants. Then it all builds up to a near panic attack before the very end.

Pure Rave: Vol. 4 + Vol. 5 tapes (self-released, 2018?)

June 17, 2018 at 6:47 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Pure Rave are a team from Detroit who have been playing very abstract mix sets using skipping records, cheap mixers, samplers, CDJs, and I’m not sure what else. Maybe I’m not even right about all of those things. But they’ve been sort of the house DJs for the last 2 Trip Metal Fests, playing weird, warped, noisy dance beats in between bands. It’s hard to find a whole lot of info about then, but there is a Soundcloud page. At this year’s TMF, they had a batch of 5 tapes for sale. I was close to just buying all of them, but I thought that would be overkill so I just got the last 2. There’s no info on them, so no clue when they were recorded or released, or if they’re even available anywhere besides their gigs (or any other gigs besides TMF). But the tapes encapsulate the messiness and spontaneity of Pure Rave’s club sets. The crew seem to think skipping records are way more fun to dance to than records played straight through, so you’ll have house records that keep repeating themselves, turning into their own spontaneous disco edits, and then they’ll be overlapped with other rhythms that are sort of in the same tempo but aren’t quite, and then they’ll just totally lose track and meld into something else. And there’s also moments where there’s Yasunao Tone-like glitches over everything, and some hidden screams and growls. It’s pretty chaotic and absurd but there does seem to be a sense of momentum to it, it doesn’t all seem entirely random or unfocused. And there are points where the beats straighten out and it gets pretty soul-gazing. Near the end of of Vol. 4, they move away from house and drop in some smooth yacht-jazz, and then chop and screw it for a while, making it increasingly disorienting and hallucinatory. Vol. 5 starts out with flashing carnival lights and severely slowed down voices, and the sporadic shrieks and squeaks from the previous tape are still in abundance. On this tape, instead of a continuous mix, there’s plenty of long pauses, giving the appearance of different compositions, but they sometimes seem like progressions from previous portion of the mix. It’s really hard to tell what is going on, of course, so it’s best to just give up trying to make sense and accept occasional awkward silences as part of the journey. At one point, a classical record gets muddled up with some sour horns and grubby, skipping house tracks, and it feels like it’s going somewhere and nowhere at once, and then it just fades out. The other side starts out sounding like it’s being consumed by quicksand, but the beat gets more alert later on. Then it ends with some of the same flashy carnival-type noises as the beginning. The members of Pure Rave are obviously well versed in both dance music and experimental noise, but they obviously chose the name Pure Rave because they do make dance mixes, and these tapes as well as their live sets seem like danceable avantgarde compositions.

Universal Eyes: Four Variations On ‘Artificial Society’ 2LP (Gretchen’s American Tapes, 2018)

June 16, 2018 at 9:26 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Universal Indians pre-dated Wolf Eyes by several years, but they both featured overlapping members, and it seems like Wolf Eyes progressed from them in many ways. At this year’s Trip Metal Fest, Universal Indians members Aaron Dilloway, Gretchen Gonzales, and John Olson reunited, with Wolf Eyes’ Nate Young joining them, forming Universal Eyes. The four musicians recorded a session together in a single day after not having played together in almost 2 decades. Warren Defever mixed and mastered it the next day. A few weeks later, it was completely pressed to vinyl at Third Man in a limited edition of 100 copies, and it was sold at the one-day Trip Metal Fest at El Club. Warren told me it’s easily the fastest turnaround time for a record that he’s ever seen. The album features four sidelong improvisations, and each label features one of the band members’ pictures. There’s no indication of whether that side is “their” side or not, it all sounds like group improvisations. A download card comes with the record, and the digital version of the album suggests that the records are actually meant to be played at 45 RPM, which makes for a very different dynamic. Instead of being slow and trudgy and creepy, it’s much wilder, more chaotic, freer, more ecstatic. It really is two different listening experiences depending on which speed you play it on. I guess that’s true for most records, though. Interpreting the album’s title, it sounds like the music of a fake world, where pop culture has been obliterated, the conventions of music don’t exist, and the few surviving humans have to learn how to make their own instruments and basically reinvent music from the ground up. There’s a stark, minimal drum machine that sound like a dripping faucet at one point, then at other points the rhythms are more hurried and panicking. Dilloway contributes scorching guitar noise and reel-to-reel howls, and Olson plays some truly bizarre reed instruments, sometimes more than one at a time (assuming the recording sessions were anything like their set at TMF). It does sound like variations on a theme, but it approaches it from a few different directions, and even more depending on how you listen.

Tatira: Fire Everlasting (Inam Records, 2018)

June 14, 2018 at 8:48 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

The third (and perhaps final?) release from Ryan Huber’s Tatira alias is a bit less beat-driven than the other two, focusing more on suspense and doom. There’s something fragile about the pinpoint IDM of “Rod of Iron”, while “Second Signal” is more of a dark, glowing sphere. “We Became Light” is a little closer to the new wave-ish techno of the last Tatira release, but it’s heavier on starry sweeps. While there’s tracks like the calm, bleak drones “New Clear Day” and “Weapon of Cowards”, there’s also more dramatic, complex pieces like the goth-techno jam “Fire Everlasting”. “Countermand” is punchy, monochromatic techno which feels like it’s going to build up something but it just goes headstrong until it fades out. “Unimpeded Fall” starts out sounding like it’s going to lead into another steady techno track, but then it abruptly switches into a furnace blast of noise, with some dripping water or ticking clock rhythm behind it. “Shadow Realm” ends the album with seven minutes of foreboding storm cloud drone. Free download at Bandcamp.