The Answer Is In The Beat

Briain: E-FAX004 12″ EP (Art-E-Fax, 2019)

January 5, 2020 at 2:19 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

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.

Longmont Potion Castle: Tour Line Live (D.U. Records, 2019)

December 29, 2019 at 4:43 pm | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

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.

Seiho/Matthewdavid: Spore Drive Split EP tape (Leaving Records, 2019)

December 25, 2019 at 11:59 am | Posted in Reviews | Leave a comment

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.