The Answer Is In The Beat

Lubomyr Melnyk: Rivers and Streams (Erased Tapes, 2015)

January 26, 2016 at 10:25 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Ukrainian composer and musician Lubomyr Melnyk is the fastest piano player in the world, and a pioneer of a form of extremely rapid and complex piano playing he calls “continuous music.” He’s been releasing records since the ’70s, but has mostly been under the radar until recent years, with albums on labels such as Important Records and Unseen Worlds. This is his second album for Erased Tapes, and it’s a prime example of his beautiful, delicate yet intense style. The pieces here are all nature themed, specifically water and rainforests, and they have an appropriately natural flow to them. For someone with such impressive technical abilities, he doesn’t sacrifice subtlety, grace, or heart. The pieces seem simultaneously minimalist and maximalist, with a limited palette of sounds cascading and overlapping each other, but without sounding cluttered or random. On this album, he’s joined by guitarist Jamie Perera (on “Sunshimmers” and “Ripples in a Water Scene”) and Korean flautist Hyelim Kim, who adds a haunting dimension of sound to “The Amazon: The Highlands”. “The Amazon: The Lowlands” ends the album with another waterfall-like piece. Highly recommended.

Linafornia: Yung tape (Dome of Doom, 2016)

January 24, 2016 at 5:05 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

This one appeared in my inbox a few days ago and as soon as I heard it I immediately had to post about it. There’s no shortage of instrumental hip-hop beat tapes out there, but this one is a concentrated burst of energy, with loud, dirty beats, grubby mind-transforming echo effects, and lots of sharp, caustic glitching. It flashes back to the type of boom-bap ’90s hip-hop with jazz and funk samples, but it pulls it apart and adds new dimensions and twists, making it feel like it’s melting and short circuiting. This is absolutely the type of music that deserves to be heard on a tape, but the rapid buzzing and glitching keeps it from sounding too stuck in the ’90s. “Xtrctions” starts out with some scratching, but it feels more like trying to get a conked-out turntable to start working again rather than trying to rock a party. But then the last track does just that by remixing Busta Rhymes with a bunch of backwards beats and flanged-out echo. Easily the best beat scene-type release I’ve heard in a while.

(703) 863-4357: Shine Operator tape (Pastel Voids, 2016)

January 24, 2016 at 4:48 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

I was unaware of Pastel Voids before their newest batch, but everything I’ve heard so far has blown me away, especially Jonny Oso, this one, and another one I’m planning on reviewing soon. Of course the label has a Bandcamp with more free downloads than I have time for. But this new batch is all worth checking out. This tape stands out not just because of the fact that the artist name is a phone number (I don’t dare attempt to call the number, but it’s a Northern Virginia area code and the album makes it seems like the number for a sort of radio station), but also because it’s full of cheap breakbeats and gabber kicks. It’s about time the tape-releasing ’90s fetishists start embracing early gabber and happy hardcore. I’m waiting for a full-on Mokum Records revival, myself. Anyway, this tape has kind of a gray, poorly designed wedding album-like cover, but it has some nice stompy beats and a few rave-y melodies. It’s not stuck in the past though, there’s some concessions to recent forms of dance music, some trap beats and juke jitteriness here and there. I think more than anything this just makes me wish Knifehandchop was still making music.

Longmont Potion Castle: 12 + The Albert Lerner Trio/Longmont Potion Castle: split 2LP (D.U. Records, 2015)

January 24, 2016 at 4:26 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

It’s a good start to the year if there’s not one but two new Longmont Potion Castle releases. LPC 12 is more Skype and voice modulator terrorism, and while he’s still calling people up asking about ridiculous products and demanding payment, the people he’s calling still fall for it and it’s still hilarious. He’s calling from the Ho Ho House, and all the calipers on his Daihatsu Blooper are ruined. His record store calls are as ridiculous as ever; he asks about a band called Hobo Barf and keeps throwing his voice around. He also claims that he’s in a band of musical gnomes and wants to sell his album on consignment. There’s also the saga of when he’s been hired to photograph the Little Miss Clackamas pageant and he’s been told to pixelize the film, and he just won’t give up whenever the guy tries to reason with him and tell him how to go about fulfilling his ridiculous requests. And then of course he threatens the guy: “How ’bout I pixelize your teeth?” His later albums have more of his own voice, because his voice just keeps getting funnier, but there’s a couple moments like on the earlier LPC releases where he repeats some of the more flustered responses from callers, and I think he might even cut his own voice out just to leave the confused-sounding callers. And he’s definitely cutting some space out of the calls to make them more rapidfire on a few tracks. The limited CDr version of the album was sold out by the time I found out about it, so I grabbed a digital download, but there was a tape version still available. Anyway, if you’re well versed in LPC, you know you need this in your life. If you haven’t heard LPC before, you need it anyway.

The other new LPC release is a lot different, in that it’s one of the project’s few entirely musical releases. Basically the only other ones before this that have little or nothing to do with prank phone calls are the split 7″ with Hatebeak and a collection or two of just the metal interludes from the albums. This double LP collection (which also had a limited CD release which I think has sold out) starts out with an LP by the mostly instrumental Albert Lerner Trio (which lists two different drummers, I assume they appear on different tracks) who play a sort of twangy, thrashy spaghetti western rock. There’s moments that get pretty heavy which dovetail into sprightly country without missing a beat. The album’s 17 brief tracks all feel like the soundtrack to scenes of a trippy, surrealist film set in the scorching desert heat, so it’s all too appropriate that Longmont Potion Castle provides remixes for the album’s second disc. He adds plenty of exaggerated echo and effects to the drum and guitar tracks, as well as lots of spoken snippets, some of which are from his phone calls, but most of them are likely from movies or TV or other sources. It’s definitely fun and playful, even if it doesn’t go for all-out hilarity or ridiculousness. His sample placement is impeccable; his sense of timing is excellent no matter what he does. Everything fits together in a more musical way than it ever has for him. On “Birds (No, Sorry Mix)” he surrounds the atmospheric post-rock with bird sounds, and then samples one of his calls where he asks someone at a store if he can bring his bird into the shop because it helps him to see. A musician caller excitedly talking about mixing different style of music appears on both this album and LPC 12, and his enthusiastic rambling is bolstered here by LPC’s drum echoing, spiraling-up bass, and sporadic piano and sax bursts. Whoever this caller is, he could end up being the new Tight Bros. This definitely feels like a sort of vanity side project for Longmont, but it’s a good showcase of his musical side (it wouldn’t be accurate to say his “serious” side).

Letta: Testimony (Coyote, 2015)

January 24, 2016 at 2:56 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Haven’t really heard too much about Letta, and he’s not the only artist using that name so Last.fm isn’t any help, but this is a seriously great, lush instrumental grime album in the vein of Logos or Strict Face. It’s the type of album that as soon as I put it on, it sounds immediately familiar and comfortable, yet it still has unique sounds and approaches to rhythm. Very spacious and considered, it takes its time to build the skeletal rhythms and translucent bass sounds, along with ghostly voices and Castlevania-like effects. Those video game shattering noises in “The Recluse” are grin-inducing, and I swear I’ve heard that weightless bass melody before, but it sounds so good. “North Face” can’t help throwing in an already over-used R&B sample, because every producer does that, but “Do You Ever See” samples late-period Everything But The Girl, so he gets points for that. Letta and Last Japan trade remixes at the end of the album, and Last Japan seems to have more of a developed sound, and his style is a bit more dramatic. Despite a few gunshot sounds here and there, this definitely isn’t the type of overwhelming, suffocating, noisy grime album that a lot of producers have been releasing as of late, it’s sparse and melodic and melancholy, and not really club-friendly, but definitely accessible. Certainly a name to watch.

Daniël Jacques: Discovery Change (Part 3) 12″ (Jadac Recordings, 2015)

January 24, 2016 at 2:26 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Mellow but still very detailed house. Relaxing chords with lots of echo-drenched samples and percussion samples. A very ocean-waves-at-night feeling. The A-side is a 7-minute club track, but the B-side is a short, eerie spoken word sample piece and then a softly skipping track with cutup vocals and trumpet. Really nice and soothing, but not by-the-numbers chillout music, there’s way more to it than that.

Rabit & Dedekind Cut: R&D EP (Ninja Tune, 2016)

January 21, 2016 at 9:08 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

Out of nowhere, Rabit and Lee Bannon (now known as Dedekind Cut) just released this white label 12″ on Ninja Tune. It. Is. Un. Fucking. Believable. Rabit’s album was one of my absolute favorites from last year, and Bannon has been has been on a tear for a few years himself. But this 12-minute mini-epic blows all expectations out of the water. The four tracks here unpredictably jaunt between angry junglist soundclash bursts, gabber kicks, sparse yet bass-heavy hauntings, chopped-and-screwed snippets, and other sonic weaponry. There’s a few brief moments of stillness, but they’re violently, arrhythmically interrupted, and the third track feels like an all out war. The final track is a melting, aching post-garage track which brings to mind the fact that Burial hasn’t released anything in a while, but with other people making music this astonishing, I think we can wait a little longer. I feel like there’s going to be a lot of music like this in 2016, and I’m excited.