:: GussetBLOG ::

:: Thursday, July 17, 2008 ::

Reviewcore

I am way way behind on the reviews again. Thanks to everybody who sends me stuff. I will play tracks from each of these on my next Goatlab radio show so readers can better put sounds to my words. In the meantime, here are my thoughts on these releases.

Dalglish – Ideom (Record Label Records)



According to the press release this latest album from Dalglish (Chris Douglas, a.k.a. O.S.T. and Rook Valard) refuses to be comparable with anything else, but I have to try at least. My initial thoughts, during the jarring opening track Exhinenoln, are of Detach’i. In particular, I remember once having an online conversation with Detach’I where I joked that he was the only musician I knew who had more fetish models in his myspace friends than I did. His response was, “one day, I will have them all in my chamber.” This is what I imagine that would sound like. Think of the huge galactic atmospheres created in something like Meat Beat Manifesto’s Echo in Space Dub, and then imagine those sounds displaced into a disused underground bunker, walls wet with seeping water, an earthy smell in the stale air, huge empty metallic tanks of long forgotten use ringing out in sympathy, a gloomy half-light of a cheep torch about to fail and plunge you into darkness. Something is alive down here. Has someone else crept in too? What’s that bubbling noise? Where is than num coming from? Just your mind playing tricks surely. This is the sound of urban exploring. Of daring to go where you know you shouldn’t because you just can’t resist finding out what’s there, despite knowing the dangers. The idea of being the only person to see it that way is such a temptation, so maybe you should record something to show other people when, or if, you ever return.

Released 4th August on Record Label Records

Fluoresent Gray – Gaseous Opal Orbs (Record Label Records)



The sleeve notes here give the impression of something that is focused more on the academic experimentation than on making music one might listen to in a club environment. Explanations of tracks created entirely from time-stretching pure sine waves and white noise, or entirely using physically modelled instruments or reverse engineered Nintendo sound chips is interesting stuff. Intentionally limiting your sound palette in such a way can force you down experimental paths you perhaps wouldn’t have tried otherwise, force you to find new ways to do things, and perhaps most importantly force you to avoid cliché. It definitely makes for some intriguing listening here. My only complaint, however, is that because of the different approaches used the album doesn’t gel well as a whole. Any given track works great when mixed with god knows what else when I listen on shuffle, but if you play the album through a couple of the tracks stand out from the others for all the wrong reasons. The world music sounds used heavily on Ayhuascaro Empyreal but nowhere else for example. It just doesn’t seem to fit with everything else even though it is fine in isolation. I get the impression that this album is made up of lots of individual experiments, where the lessons learnt in each are not employed again in the others. I’d suggest as the next experiment, that everything learnt composing all of these tracks be used to create a new album. A more cohesive album with a sound of its own. It would draw together more learning than most other people would achieve in an entire career.

Out now on Record Label Records

The Teknoist – various new vinyl releases
Thanks to Miike for the MP3 versions of his forthcoming (and probably long since released by the time I get around to publishing this) releases on Bangarang, Deathchant, Death$ucker, Ninja Clone, Ninja Colombo and Sustained Records. The Teknoist usual gabba head is on form with the Deathchant and Sustained releases. I’ve taken the piss when chatting to Miike previously about everything he does being just a gabba track with some film samples over it. He dispels that here by producing a gabba track with Kill Bill samples over it. ;-]

The Bangarang, Ninja Clone and Ninja Colombo releases are all collaborations with Scheme Boy (a.k.a. Ash of BOEP, of the Adverse Camber collective). These are a little more playful and a childish sense of humour comes through in them. Not that they aren’t still hard enough to tear the flesh off your grannies ass at 50m, to indulge in the same juvenile banter.

The highlight of the selection though, has to be the Death$ucker split with Eustachian. Perhaps spurred on to compete with Eustachian’s furious and complex layered death metal inspired beats, Teknoist has created something much closer to breakcore than his normal output. And I have to say, he does a stunning job of it. I hope there is more like this to come in the future.

Death$ucker and Bangarang releases out now, the others to follow

Labels: Electronic Music, Review

:: Dan 17.7.08 [Arc] [0 comments] ::
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