R.I.P. Mark Bell

I'm really sad to announce that Mark Bell has passed away due to complications from surgery. An electronic pioneer with his work as one half of LFO, his genre bending of house with techno was ahead of the game, and he was one of my favorite album producers of the 90's. Bjork has kept him aboard since he produced her "Homogenic" album. He will be soreley missed.

And...well, Fucking LFO, y'all!!!

Call Super - Depicta / Acephale II (Houndstooth, 2014)

JR Seaton is back with a couple of serious burners. Side A is a finely honed kick in the ribs of a groove, one that is getting straight to the dancefloor with no bullshit. Side B is a bit spacey and organic but it's not wasting too much time fucking around either. I'm really feeling both.

"Call Super comes back to Fabric X Rob Booth's Houndstooth label with two melancholic, uniquely textured techno drivers. 'Depicta' turns out a tuffened 4/4 groove rent with finely layered harmonics and bristling with atomised electronic structures bound to sound amazing on a big rig. 'Acephale II' is a shade deeper, riding clipped, muffled kicks and fizzing percussion into blue, atmospheric synth zones recalling '90s classics from The Connection Machine or early PAS and The Black Dog." -Boomkat

Merryl / Flex 1000 - Split CS (New Body, 2014)

Merryl's (Asheville) side begins with a deep warbling that deconstructs / constructs / reconstructs into some sort of slow viscous pulse. The scab is scratched off to reveal a narcotic four on the floor beat . For lucid ketamine dreaming on the dance floor.

Flex 1000's (Baltimore) side starts off with chaotic loops and noisy stabs that gives way to a rough punkish techno beat reminiscent of some of the intense late 90's Belgian dance scene with a hint of Empire's digital hardcore. There are vocals in there somewhere, buried in this beautiful muck. The second piece is a creepy low end slow burner. A synth loop base with horrifically inane vocals with a sudden shift, resulting in a bright Conrad Schnitzleresque high frequency finale.

This release is from the relatively new tape label called New Body out of Boone, NC.
New Body tapes can be ordered HERE

Actress - Ghettoville (Werk Discs, 2014)

"The machines have turned to stone, data reads like an obituary to its user." This was the press release accompanying this latest and supposedly final album from the brilliant mind of Darren Cunningham. And from the reaction of most fans and critics, the end has come none too soon.

 'Ghettoville' is a bit of a departure from the fun yet avant garde outings of 'Splazsh' and 'R.I.P.' His self-described 'R&B Concrete' as well as his heady lo-fi house jams have been replaced with stark, bleak, and utterly dystopian codes. Some nearly beatless, these intentionally numb melodies are held together by the thread of a drum. This is a laudanum funk, with its soul buried lazily beneath minimal breaks and lackadaisical samples. The dancefloor is still represented. Several four on the floor tracks are present. But this time they feel like a specter. The dust and sweat have long since settled, the dj standing in the booth reminiscing that final night. Ultimately, this just feels like something that would have been cozier over at Modern Love.At first listen, I wondered if Cunningham had a love child with Leyland Kirby and it was just still on the downlow.

 I'm opposed to the critics on this one. Here we have a good final document. Cunningham warned us that Actress was dead. Its possible that after being hailed as a golden child for eight years, Actress has been dead longer than we thought. Though, it didn't seem like it when I saw him perform last year. He killed it, enthusiastically stunning everyone in the crowd. The oh so exhausted one could have fooled me. He seemed to be having the time of his life. Then again, his moniker is / was 'Actress'.

   

Young Echo - Nexus (Ramp, 2013)

This is another record I regret slipping past me in 2013. The Bristol collective Young Echo is comprised of several artists with stellar output in the past couple years. Vessel's 'Order of Noise' made my best of 2012, Zhou makes meditative drone, Khan is a respected dubstep producer and the other members, El Kid, Jabu, Neek, Manomars and Ishan Sound have managed to make names for themselves.

Its no coincidence that this album has the Wild Bunch scenario, given that these kids obvious work in that Tricky / Massive Attack tradition. The general aesthetic is the blunted downtempo of their metropolitan mentors. However, Young Echo is deconstructivist. The dancefloor is broken. Beats are fodder for cutups. The hip hop and bass are buried beneath drones, spoken work, ethereal female vocals and frequencies on par with a Raster Noton album. The ghosts of Nurse with Wound and Boyd Rice are here, remixing for some cerebral nonexistent club, a place where sci-fi 2-step co-mingles with dub and introspective pop.

Elements collide, float together, fall apart and fade away, but ultimately, and surprisingly, cohesion is victorious.

Manuel Gottsching - E2-E4 (MG, 1984)

I've been on a music history kick lately and decided to make a few posts about releases that were crucially influential to musicians that followed. I'll begin with one that may be obvious to the electronic aficionado that reads this blog, 'E2-E4'. Simply put, this is the ultimate proto-techno cut. Manuel Gottsching (guitarist for Ash Ra Tempel) released his first solo album with a monument to time's end. The reason for its groundbreaking nature was his lack of submission to the popular idea of melody and development. He just rode a rhythm in repetition for nearly an hour. The trance like space this music occupies set the tone for all dance floor material that came about afterwards. If it sounds mundane and familiar to you, its just because everyone emulated this for the next decade and a half without much alteration. There ya go...Techno 101.




Here's a nice tribute reworking of one track by Ernestus and von Oswald over at the BCD:

Profligate - Come Follow Me (More, 2012)

This should have been on my 2012 list. Dammit. Ordinarily I'd be embarrassed that one of the best albums of the year passed me by unnoticed, but this year was bizarre in that many of artists released killer material after October. This one came out November 1, which is highly unusual in the marketing game. Is this a new trend? I guess that's a subject for a different article.  In fact, the only reason I know about this at all is because of my friend Justin Farrar's year end list. Thanks to him for enlightening me.

Profligate makes a particular brand of easily accessible post-industrial synth pop. There are catchy hooks buried in the dark, which is reminiscent of some old school Wax Trax / Nettwerk vibes. This aesthetic is met by Basic Channel era dub techno beats, shrouded in fuzz and scuzz. Given all of these elements, its most fascinating that the end result still feels like a pretty pop record. This is really amazing stuff. Give it a go.



Listen HERE

Purchase LP HERE

Black Dog Productions - Bytes (Warp, 1993)

In the mid-to-late 80's the new sounds coming out of Detroit and Chicago inspired even stranger mutations in England.  The Black Dog released their first record in 1989, part of the initial wave of homegrown UK techno. Technically, Bytes is a compilation of material previously released as DJ-friendly singles and EPs, produced by various combinations of The Black Dog's three members under a variety of one-off pseudonyms. 

The music could initially be mistaken for the work of some Derrick May alter-ego, but there's something else going on here, a different kind of structure being assembled out of the same parts. Instead of America's pummeling four-on-the-floor, the rhythms have a kind of Afro-Caribbean intricacy, venturing into 6/8 times, polyrhythm and polymetry. Everything from acidic synth bleeps, stoned log-drum jamming, blossoming analog chords, and classical counterpoint jostle for your attention, assembling themselves Voltron-style into shambling grooves. This approach to rhythm was soon to be reified as IDM, but this is raw stuff, good on headphones sure, but not "chill," even when it's being pretty.
America's techno was characterized by its own strange futurism, but Britain's techno was truly weird, reflecting not only the Detroit-esque industrial decay of Midlands cities like Sheffield, but also the ancient landscape outside the cities: fens and heaths, deep woods, burial mounds, stone circles. There is a palpable sense of the occult here, of a ritual enacted by Crowleyan candlelight rather than the fluorescent glow of a space station.
Now that hardware-based techno is being rebooted by noise-scene veterans and youngsters who missed it the first time around, an album like Bytes can gesture at directions not fully explored by the original pioneers. Let's hope some of the new generation return to the strange grottoes first explored here.


--This review was written by John Brinker.






Get it Here

Pete Swanson - Man With Potential (Type, 2011)

I can't help but think the mop-headed militant character on the album cover is a tongue in cheek jab at French noise enthusiast Vomir, who always performs his noise sets hidden underneath a kaffiyeh. Ironically, this scarf has become more recognizable as the fashion of a 22 year old hipster girl than the original image of Yasser Arafat and the PLO.

There are three types of listeners that will drop the needle on this one: The Drone / Noise fans of Swanson's now defunct project Yellow Swans, fans of elegant and classically-minded instrumentals typical of the Type label, and then there are those dance music fans who are as surprised as I am by beats surfacing as a newly integral part of the avant-garde Ambient / Noise / Drone world.

None of these three are remotely prepared for what happens on this album. Swanson decided to fuck with everyone here.

With a hynosis-like approach, he sends you back in time to that really bad tripping experience at the warehouse party in Detroit circa '95. You remember, the one where one of the dj's was walking around shaking hands with people, and later all your friends were talking about how he had dosed his hand with more liquid acid than you could possibly imagine.

By the time you were peaking you saw no reason not to accept the offer for some ketamine. Shortly thereafter, the lights were sizzling your brain like you were staring into the sun, and you were pulling on the side of your head trying to remove that drill bit that was furiously burrowing into your cranium.

All that to say this: Here we have blistering noise-laced techno. This is Jeff Mills, Muslimgauze and Vatican Shadow buried under 6 feet of Prurient and Wolf Eyes.

Remember to take your Dramamine and keep that gallon of oj on hand just in case you want it all to go away.

Stream it Here

Get it Here

Evil Madness - Super Great Love (Editions Mego, 2011)

To be honest, I'm kind of frustrated with Editions Mego at this point. How can a label only put out top notch material? I read about this act and thought this would definitely be the one to show that no label is perfect. Wrong. They got me again. This time its with something completely different. Brace yourself for an unusual record from some unusual guys who are ordinarily very cerebral. This is a super-group made up of BJ Nilsen (Swedish experimental sound artist and composer), Johann Johannsson (Icelandic musician who's written and produced for Marc Almond, The Hafler Trio, Pan Sonic and Barry Adamson) and members of Stilluppsteypa (Icelandic abstract / experimental electronic band).

Apparently, these very serious composers needed an outlet. What we have here is an album ready for the European dancefloor circuit. In fact, if you didn't know better, you'd assume this was another unknown early 80's act unearthed by Veronica and crew for the Minimal Wave comp. Not to limit the record to that sound, there's also a solid EBM representation here, along with industrial, coldwave and chillwave. This is tribute music for the most part with a dash of over the top modern trance and techno. Its very reminiscent of some of those later Kraftwerk tracks that were a bit silly but you loved them anyway.

I highly recommend this.

Get your new "dance in front of the mirror" score here

Or:

Stellar Om Source - Mixtape for VICE Nederland

I'm really excited about this amazing mix from Drone star Christelle Gualdi. She's usually drenched in layers of the subconscious and hypnogogic illusions. Here, its a change of pace as she offers up an acid-washed fusion of Techno, Funk and Electro. Past, Present and future dancefloors meld. This is a good time.

It's The Music (Legowelt Remix) - Murphy Jax feat. Mike Dunn
Viens Chez Moi - Alexander Robotnick
Look Within - Transllusion
Have - SO Source
Real Love(James 'Jack Rabbit' Martin Acid Edit) - Masquerade
Detroit Bass - D-House
Mind To Body - Dynarec
Bareknuckle (Nukubus Edit) - Mark du Mosch
I Hate - Omar-S
Infophysix- Dopplereffekt
Sleeping World - Brown Hardware Inc.
Trance Fusion - Mappa Mundi
Purrple Splazsh - Actress
Mirrors - Dam-Funk
Faces in Reflection No. 1 (Instrumental) - George Duke

Get Funky Now