February 8, 2022 at 8:09 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Casper Mcfadden: medicalmechanica
Just in time for Casper Mcfadden to drop
a new album tomorrow, I’m getting around to reviewing
his last one, which is still only 2 months old (and there’s also an
album of demos that came out in between the two). He’s mega prolific, but I always look forward to everything new he puts out because there’s just so much energy and creativity to what he does. Most of the tracks are only a minute or two and they all run together in an explosive, giddy rush. It’s highly playful and decidedly lo-fi, but it rarely seems tossed off or jokey. Mostly it’s just fun and chaotic, especially tracks like “midnight marauders” and “ydrahde”.
February 7, 2022 at 8:57 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
RAVETRX: Tribe Sequence
on Sherelle’s label is a debut release that instantly leaves a huge impression. “Feel the Way” smashes its way in with some demolishing Amen breaks and a memorable sample. Then “EEEEEE” is stomping industrial techno with playful yeah-woos and some more breakbeats and Detroit techno chords patched in. Plus it’s structured so suspensefully. “Feels Good Inside” is a stompy rave belter with guest producer Mani Festo, also balancing thumps with breaks, and it tucks some acid in there. “Facebook Karen” and “Tyson’s Fury” are similarly relentless no-nonsense techno, also with nods to rave. Finally, “Tribe Sequence Calling” barrels along with less jungle/breakbeat influence than the others, but lets out some sampled diva wailing at the end. Really hard, awesome EP that takes elements of early ’90s techno and just streamlines them and bangs them out.
February 6, 2022 at 3:01 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Tim Reaper: Hardcore & Rubble
Just weeks after delivering his first
Essential Mix (though every single one of his mixes are truly essential), Tim Reaper just dropped a record on
Sneaker Social Club. “Outer Realms” has oldskool darkside breaks and thick, cloudy atmospherics, just a beautiful hardcore potion that keeps on flowing. “Heavy Duty” is way more sci-fi with a slight ragga edge, and the breakdown where it feels like staring into the cosmos is truly gorgeous. “Agony Tonight” eases into ragga with some smoother dancehall/lovers rock sounding vocals, and simmers but doesn’t boil over. “Bulletproof” has fast, trippy breaks and a brief sample telling you to “bring a bulletproof vest”. It skips and glimmers, sounding excited but plagued by a fear that won’t go away.
February 6, 2022 at 10:33 am | Posted in The Answer Is In The Beat | Leave a comment
12:00 am bvdub ~ Northern Stars in Jade ~ Violet Opposition (new) ~ n5MD ~ 2022
12:19 am Black Country, New Road ~ Snow Globes ~ Ants From Up There (new) ~ Ninja Tune ~ 2022
12:28 am Idle Ray (local) ~ Corridors of Summer ~ single (new) ~ Bandcamp ~ 2022
12:32 am Immanuel Wilkins ~ Lighthouse ~ The 7th Hand (new) ~ Blue Note ~ 2022
12:40 am Teno Afrika feat. Leyla ~ Where You Are ~ Where You Are (new) ~ Awesome Tapes from Africa ~ 2022
12:46 am VTSS ~ The need to avoid ~ Projections EP (new) ~ Technicolour ~ 2022
12:49 am Two Shell ~ home ~ 12″ (new) ~ Mainframe Audio ~ 2021
12:53 am Spooky Bizzle ~ Jungle Pulse ~ single (new) ~ Bandcamp ~ 2022
12:58 am Kaizo Slumber ~ Purple Is the New Green ~ The Kaizo Manifesto (new) ~ No Agreements ~ 2022
1:02 am CDR ~ Knot 06 ~ Live at Knot 2021.12.15 (new) ~ RDC Records ~ 2022
1:05 am bye2 ~ Chao Dialysis ~ Teeth Restoration (new) ~ Kitty On Fire ~ 2021
1:13 am Kiefer ~ Lift Somebody Up ~ When There’s Love Around (new) ~ Stones Throw ~ 2021
1:20 am Oiro Pena ~ Nimetön ~ Spiritual Jazz 13: Now! Part One / Modern Sounds For The 21st Century ~ Jazzman ~ 2019
1:24 am Benny Carter Quartet ~ Almost Like Being in Love ~ Summer Serenade ~ Storyville ~ 1983
1:31 am Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers ~ Blues March ~ First Flight to Tokyo: The Lost 1961 Recordings ~ Blue Note ~ 1961
1:43 am Kids on a Crime Spree ~ Overtaken by the Soil ~ Fall in Love Not in Line (new) ~ Slumberland ~ 2022
1:45 am Pylon ~ Crazy ~ Chomp ~ New West ~ 1983
1:48 am Roy Montgomery ~ Pranged ~ That Best Forgotten Work (new) ~ Grapefruit ~ 2021
1:53 am Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds ~ Vortex ~ B-Sides & Rarities Part II ~ Mute ~ 2006
1:57 am Adrian Younge & Ali Shaheed Muhammad W/ João Donato ~ Adrian, Ali & Gregory ~ JID 007 (new) ~ Jazz Is Dead ~ 2021
February 5, 2022 at 12:30 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Kaizo Slumber: The Kaizo Manifesto
‘s glitched-out footwork was pretty remarkable, but the producer has come into their own with this new album as
Kaizo Slumber. Lush, flowing atmospheric rave melodies and pianos joined with ecstatic breaks, and some more aggressive banging kicks in all the right places. There’s a bit of a dystopian theme to this, making it seem a little harder than the usual neo-rave effort, but it’s still a hugely joyous release that isn’t making a grand attempt at sounding cool or trendy. There’s bits that sound a little like Scooter or the more aggressive side of ’90s action movie electronica or donk, but all folded into this specific aesthetic. It all feels like a massive spontaneous rave outside a nuclear reactor, except there’s only like 5 people there, but the music is so loud and so fast that the speakers appear 10 times bigger than they are.
February 5, 2022 at 10:45 am | Posted in Crush Collision | Leave a comment
12:01 am Echo 106 ~ Blackness (short edit)
12:04 am Nu Jacks featuring Ivory Ranks ~ House Sensation
12:08 am Alpha 606 ~ Slave Trade
12:11 am Ludus Pinsky ~ Catatuned
12:14 am Wayward ~ Back to the Old Days
12:17 am Universal Agents ~ West of Athens
12:24 am Ana3 ~ Luis
12:29 am Dance System ~ 909 Revolution
12:32 am Dukwa ~ Violet (live extract)
12:35 am Locked Groove ~ Attack
12:39 am Com Truise ~ Persuasion System (Anastasia Kristensen Remix)
12:44 am Graham Dunning ~ Retort
12:46 am HVOB ~ Butter (Steffi Remix)
12:51 am Welsh Modular Alliance ~ NoiseTek1
12:54 am Hiver ~ Stellar Parallax Landing
12:58 am Amiture ~ Dream
The second hour of this week’s show was Lexa’s first ever appearance on Crush Collision!
February 4, 2022 at 8:50 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
CDR: Live at Knot 2021.12.15
CDR is quite possibly the most prolific breakcore producer of all time, with over
500 releases to his credit and growing. While some of his releases have seemed formulaic in the past (anime samples + looped Amen breaks + assloads of distortion = check, done, upload to Soulseek or Bandcamp now), he’s also created some powerful work that clearly took a lot of effort. Some of the stuff he was releasing on ADAADAT a few years ago fell into the latter category, and
this recent live album might even be better than that. Easing off on the distortion a bit, but still wielding some killer breaks, this is a continuous flow of junglistic breakcore that just keeps heading deeper and deeper down the rabbithole. He hasn’t done lush, hypnotic melodies like this in the past, and the beats seem a little on the same tip as current jungle revival stuff, but by the third track it’s clear that this is messed up enough to come from a veteran of the breakcore scene. His music has simply never sounded this pretty before, nor has it ever gotten this heady and emotional. “Knot 06” is a standout, starting out sounding like a remix of Grimes’ “Genesis” before crashing into a chiptune melody. Then there’s ethereal choirs floating through the next track only to be demolished by an onslaught of noisy glitch. Fucking amazing. This is why I still listen to breakcore 25 years after discovering DHR. Highest recommendation.
February 2, 2022 at 6:11 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
Christopher Parker & the Band of Guardian Angels: Soul Food
Pianist Christopher Parker leads this
all-star assembly on a nourishing quest with no earthly boundaries. The lineup includes wind multi-instrumentalist Daniel Carter, trumpeter Jaimie Branch, bassist William Parker, and drummer Gerald Cleaver, in addition to vocalist Kelley Hurt, who plays with both Parkers in Dopolarians, and also collaborated with Christopher on 2020’s
No Tears Suite, written about the Little Rock Nine. While that album clearly had a story and a message behind it, this one is more of a melding of forces and cluster of energies than anything else. Hurt’s vocals are amorphous and interpretive rather than lyrical, and the rest of the band similarly pushes, pulls, and spills out, freely expressing themselves rather than running through melodies or follow straightforward rhythms. “Guardian Angels” is the most immediately gripping piece here, with William Parker sounding like he’s sawing out the innards of his bass, and the rest of the musicians sort of pushing in the same direction, but also moving in their own paths. The proceedings do get a little messy, and later into the album, it does get to the point where it’s hard to tell if the musicians are actually in the same room, paying attention to each other’s playing. Christopher Parker’s piano playing stands out, getting quite rollicking at some points. Hurt curiously seems to disappear from the studio for a while, although she resurfaces on the final track.
February 1, 2022 at 8:59 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
bye2: Teeth Restoration
Separated by short ambient “prayer” interludes, most of the tracks on
bye2’s latest album are stunning, prismatic neo-rave diamonds cut into lustrous shapes which reflect in countless directions. It’s hard to think of neo-rave music contorted as much as “Chao Dialysis”, which has hard-to-count time sigs, yet it’s still highly fun and danceable. “Kotu Tavsan” has whomping bass and slashing breaks, then flips into souped-up 4/4 thumps and glitched-out dancehall vocals, with some more break choppage and CeCe Peniston samples thrown into the rave. There’s a few other obvious early ’90s dance samples on the album, but it’s not as much of a nostalgia trip (however many generations removed, I doubt this producer was born before the late ’90s) as it might seem. “Reverse Nightmare Tower” has a unique way of flipping dark, lo-bit garage into crystal-drenched electro into glowing neo-rave with grime samples. “Wheel of Fate” is more of an epic battle in an arcade, and the closing “prayer7” is a breezy, shimmering electro-glide which sounds easy even with its broken time sig.
January 31, 2022 at 8:33 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment
VTSS: Projections EP
is far from the industrial techno she’s often known for, though it is caustic and heavy. “The need to avoid” starts out almost like warped dancehall before exploding with frantic breaks. “For your safety” is brittle and jittery, somewhere between footwork and glitchy IDM, but with a smooth atmosphere elevating it. Ultimately it is definitely dance music more so than head music, but works as both. “Live laugh leave” is more intensely blown out not-quite-dancehall with splintering, erratic beats. “Propaganda of success” creeps and lurches, then donks you over the head with gabber kicks. “Why we don’t deserve nice things” seems a little less intense than the other tracks, but still rustles and bubbles over with feverish anticipation. The EP is short but dense, and highly impressive.
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