FROG POCKET
Moon Mountain Of The Fords
BEN024
12" / CD
Benbecula 2004 

For all their trailblazing digital envelope mangling, the principle early protagonists of what was once injudiciously dubbed ‘Intelligent Dance Music’ must sometimes ponder the perpetually grey legacy they have wrought on the leftfield musical sphere. Sensitive to the fact that to accuse newly-produced uptempo electronic fare of slavish Aphexism is fast becoming as much of a cliché as the music in question arguably is, one still struggles to describe a record such as Frog Pocket’s Moon Mountain Of The Fords EP (Benbecula) without strongly alluding to the multitude of early Warp reference points it mires itself in, specifically the more introspective, bittersweet moments from said notorious Cornish maverick’s voluminous cannon of material. A doleful-eyed Scot in person, Frog Pocket is a minor revelation live, fiddling along to his scrupulously crafted glitchcore like Nigel Kennedy being sodomised with a crackling wet bare-wire control cable. On record, however, he betrays his influences all too brazenly, and unfortunately did himself few favours when given the platform of a Mixing It slot late last year by dropping the two most obvious names – Autechre & AFX again – as his musical raison d’etre.

BEANS
Now Soon Someday
WAP167
7" / 12" / CD
Warp Records 2004 

Meanwhile, as the pretenders to Warp’s undesirable media-perpetuated ‘IDM’ crown stubbornly continue to ape the label’s defining artists and sounds, the reputed granddaddy of electronica pursues its own, precedent-free agenda. Although offshoot imprint Lex remains the primary conduit for the (often tenuously) hip hop-flavoured experimentalism it has come to embrace, a select few of the more iconic visionaries in the field have made it to the Warp roster ‘proper’, with New York rapper/producer Beans steadily cementing his status as arch existentialist-futurist emcee of the moment through last year’s intermittently inspired Tomorrow Right Now long player, and now with its mini-album complement piece Now Soon Someday. His latest offering shares the same curiously sleek yet scuzzed up 808 production stylings as its sister release, Beans displaying indisputable affinities with the reverent minimalism of recent Timbaland on the stealthy cyberhop opener Structure Tone, and following track Win Or Lose You Lose. The recurring lyrical motif of the latter, ‘wearing a fleece in a sauna’, is aptly allegorical of Beans’s vocal approach, which could be loosely conceptualised around the exertion of uncomfortable pressure, occasionally squeezing lines out of the confines of regular cadence. For all the impressive metrical compression, Beans never quite ties linguistic knots around the cortex in as visceral a fashion as the tag team triumvirate Anti-Pop Consortium with whom he rose to prominence, and his ‘name’ remixers El-P & Prefuse 73 appear to be coasting somewhat here, with the Def Jux supremo unexpectedly swapping chaos for cowbells on his re-rub of Mutescreamer.

SIXTOO
Box Cutter Emporium
ZEN12148
12"
Ninja Tune 2004 

In a vaguely similar hip-hop-with-electronic-leanings vein, Sixtoo marks his relocation to Ninja Tune with the Box Cutter Emporium 12”. Portentous three-part suite Bad Luck Comes In Threes unravels itself across side one, the second section’s brutal, jagged two-note riff striking like the fiercest Sabbath guitar track, as if it were first strummed in 1975 and then mutated via an infinitely delayed feedback loop through a score of ‘rustic valve’ amps till the moment Sixtoo captured it here. The relative cleanliness of the MPC work is a minor quibble that is swiftly recompensed by the raw, cavernous drum track which underpins B-side Storm Clouds & Silver Linings, an unlikely hook-up with Damo Suzuki from Can, who tempers the sense of dimly light disused parking lot paranoia somewhat with some slightly unpalatable improv vocal histrionics that lie mercifully low in the mix. Maybe on Tago Mago, Damo, but not here. In sum a promising early sowing of seed on UK label soil from Sixtoo, certainly exhibiting a headier repertoire of sounds than evidenced on the soporific exercise in RJD2-biting that is fellow Ninja newbie Blockhead’s Insomniac Olympics EP.

cLOUDDEAD
Dead Dogs Two
BD064
12"
Big Dada 2004 

Broader yet of sonic scope, and perversely sharing roster-space with Ty on Ninja subsidiary Big Dada, we are finally blessed with the latest recorded efforts of Anticon supergroup extreme cLOUDDEAD, featuring the prodigious individual talents of why?, Doseone & Odd Nosdam, amalgamating unfettered musical imagination with a newly-found adroitness at assimilating the most disparate of influences into their inimitably tangential technicolour not-hop. Returning single Dead Dogs Two, despite being arguably the one track on new album Ten NOT to whip up an imposing maelstrom of delirious originality, still serves fine as the notional cLOUDDEAD pop song (there is, by coincidence, a track on the album called Pop Song, which isn’t.). Even here, however a discreet fug of early-nineties English psychedelia, all held tones and wraithlike feedback, cloaks the deceptively honeyed harmonising about bloodied tendons and reincarnated canines, while any accusation of over-egged feyness arising from the sardonic sing-along chorus is punctured by the arcane intonations of Werner Herzog closing the whole thing up. The chunky, melody-drenched Boards Of Canada remix, meanwhile, conjures an enticing prospect: BOC as leftfield hip hop super-producers, anyone? Thought so...

John Stevens