The Answer Is In The Beat

Longmont Potion Castle: 14 (D.U. Records, 2017)

September 4, 2017 at 4:49 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Two very long Longmont albums in one year?!? How on earth is this guy more prolific than he’s ever been? And how does he keep getting better and weirder every year? His conversations become more convoluted and he’s staying on the phone with people longer and just spouting out bizarreness and confusing people. On this album he’s resumed calling into radio shows and saying ridiculous things that the people on the other end can’t follow. One guy asks what app he’s using to make his voice change, as he’s talking about the phone he just bought doing crazy things and projecting voices and weird sounds. When he calls saying he’s representing Historical Hair, one guy goes psycho screaming at him, but he still keeps him on the phone for a while. He calls a show called Gabby Gourmet asking about bumblebee pudding, and they’re confused but polite and he wins a gift certificate from them. Also he gets into a 10 minute argument with some kid who think he’s a global elite at Counterstrike. There’s way more but you have to buy it yourself to hear. It’s worth it, of course, it always is, LPC never ceases to be consistently amazing.

Chronotope Project: Ovum (Spotted Peccary, 2017)

August 27, 2017 at 5:51 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

When this first showed up in the mail, somehow I didn’t even realize at first that I already have the album this group released last year. I listened to this a few times while going to sleep and it didn’t make much of an impression at first, it just sounded like pretty standard new age, with flutes and percussion and stuff. It really grew on me, though. It’s super comforting, but not entirely fluffy and light, it gets a bit darker and deeper at times. It’s typically slow, sliding, and fluid, and is equally in tune with nature as well as space. It utilizes a synth called the Haken Continuum Fingerboard, which looks pretty crazy. I’m into it.

USA/Mexico: Laredo LP (12XU, 2017)

August 26, 2017 at 3:53 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Austin band USA/Mexico includes guitarist Craig Clouse of Shit & Shine, drummer King Coffey of the Butthole Surfers, and bassist Nate Cross of When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth. All of that adds up to expectations that this album will be weird, noisy, brutal, scary, and horribly fucked up, right? Well, you’re still not ready for how insane this album actually is. The noise is as harsh and engulfing as any power electronics record you care to name, but then the rhythm section bludgeons you with even more intense power. And the vocals sound like they’re coming from a combusting Dalek. They just don’t sound human. On top of that, there’s some digital glitch disorienting everything at certain moments, like near the end of opener “Possum Trot”. “Laredo” is ten times harsher than the first track, yet the rhyth, keeps barreling along straight ahead for the whole 7 minutes. “Windsor Park Hardcore” is 90 seconds of the most volatile, noise-blasted hardcore imaginable. The album ends with a just barely recognizable cover of The Fall’s “L.A.” The nice, peaceful cover art is entirely not representative of what this sounds like. Not at all. You are not ready.

Fracture: Cold & Rain 12″ EP (Astrophonica, 2017)

August 13, 2017 at 11:43 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

I’ve been oblivious to Fracture until now, even though he’s released dozens of records on labels like Metalheadz, Exit, Offshore, Ohm Resistance, etc. since the early 2000s (either solo or with Neptune). This is supercharged club music with tightly edited breaks, lots of energetic samples, and pop elements which don’t seem overly saccharine or cloying. It has the rolling, choppy beats of post-2000 drum’n’bass but doesn’t just settle into looping the same patterns over and over (I haven’t heard drum’n’bass that does this in quite a while, and I’m hoping this style has died out and people are just simply more creative now), and there’s some footwork-ness (he’s collaborated with DJ Earl) but it stays within the d’n’b realm. “So High” (a co-production w/ Alix Perez) uses chipmunk rave vocals to build up its momentum, but it manages to stay somewhat muted compared to how you might expect it to get, and there’s some really inventive bass tones. Looks like this is a back catalog I need to plunge into.

Sug: God’s Clit Vol. 2: Time vs. Flesh tape (Hausu Mountain, 2017)

August 13, 2017 at 11:15 pm | Posted in Reviews | 1 Comment

Sugarm is now just Sug, and his first tape in several years is a long, heavy expedition which questions mortality and earthly existence. It’s very noisy and disjointed, with tripped-out distortion and floating, detached samples flying around heavy beats. It has the usual anything-goes spirit of Hausu Mountain releases, but is a bit noisier and darker than a lot of their releases, yet there’s still a cartoonish playfulness apparent. But there’s some very longform drone examinations here, such as “Silent Spiral”, which ends up sampling some sort of dizzy heavy breathing exercise before the speaker-panned beats jumble in and try really hard to make you lose your mind. “The Wizard Drips” is the shortest piece but it ends up being an entrancing psychic death march. “16 16 16” is a half hour long and takes up the entire second side of the tape, and it features the type of mind-warping that can only be accomplished with an EVI.