April 2012
10 posts
Polar Inertia - Sole Star
Cripes. This has been a good week. First the Swarm, then the Sam, and now the ‘Sole Star’. I’ve been craving some really deep techno for a while – the kind of techno that stirs the deepest paths of your intestines, electrifies the end of your fingertips, forces shut the lids of your eyes, and propels the sinews in your shoulders. This, ladies and gentlemen, is that techno.
From French label...
Sam KDC Sparks
Introspective, determination. Insistence, rhythm. Storming through the streets, water underfoot. Frozen Mint Munchies: hard, dusty, b-leak.
According to his soundcloud, Samuel Wood is based ‘On the road’. I like this. His music too is not tied down, nor identifiable with one location or one sound or one expectation. The track, surely to be described as ‘liquid, man’, is not. The beat, surely to be...
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Albert Swarm The Sea That Calls All Things Unto...
Albert Swarm, the mysterious creator of one of the best EPs of the last few years (that being Held - released 2011), has just put up a free track on his soundcloud called ‘The Sea That Calls All Things Unto Her’. Apparently titled from Kahlil Gibran’s poem ‘The Coming of the Ship’, the track really does evoke a vessel meandering menacingly through the mist, skating...
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Jack Dixon You Old
Minimal beats, yer.
Club de Visionaire in Berlin - populated by grim expats like me dancing badly, supping Bayerisch Bier - is an island of minimal surrounded by more modern electronica. Every time I went down to the river there was an extremely thin tall girl playing records, with a cigarette as perfectly affixed as her concentration on the decks. And, every time, she ruined the floor. Building...
XANAX
Just watched some of Jools live, and caught the Maccabees and this chap called Willis Earl Beal. I’ve always been critical of the sound on the show. The levels are almost always off; the drums sound tinny and empty; and if you can hear the vocalist at an appropriate noise, then it’s your lucky day. But the Maccabees - whose album is excellent - were barely audible. The sound was rank....
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Bikes, Canals, and LA Beat: Copenhagen’s Beastie...
In a recent interview with the 170bpm ‘zine Organic Beats, Copenhagen’s Beastie Respond said he found inspiration for his track ‘Syncopy’ when riding his bike. Bikes and transportation in general, he said, were frequently inspirational. If you haven’t heard ‘Syncopy’, it’s five minutes of throbbing bass, bent guitar and a key riff masquerading as a derelict David Lynch carnival. At 170 bpm....
Ambalance
Toronto-cum-Berlin’s XI - creator of sexy sax-crunching ‘Gamma Rain’ - is back with new EPCokewave. The producer, who also recently brought us the incising ‘Immunity/Squeeze’ single, delivers this new cut with fellow Canadian Skeleton Bone under the moniker Ambalance. But, rather predictably, the two have been getting some stick for perhaps or perhaps not inventing...
Arclight: Holographic
Oh Man! After yesterday’s coverage of the re-emergence of Juk Juk, another name from 2011 comes back big.
In more than a few eminent mixes last year could you hear Arclight’s ‘Vitamin D’ - and now, courtesy of Jacques Greene’s VASE label, it gets a full release with the Holographic single.
The layers in ‘Vitamin D’ are like waves enveloping themselves....
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Juk Juk: Fall/Unwrap
In the middle of last summer I came across this track to be released on Four Tet’s label: ‘Winter Turn Spring’. Its most striking element was the shuffling drum beat, an almost feverish garage tap which harnessed the ethereal noise above and drove it onwards, relentlessly.
Producer Caleb Waterman, known as Juk Juk, has now returned with ‘Fall’/’Unwrap’, a...
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LV & Untold: Beacon
Depth. I guess it can be created with a huge, echoing kick drum. Or a murky bassline. Low frequency noises all over DA place. Etc.
But ‘Beacon’ - well - this here is an amalgam. Reverberations are both herald and harlot: the usher to a gloriously unsettling bassline, and the mother of all disonant breakdowns.
LV and Untold’s monster was born on Hemlock back in 2010 when I...
