themilkfactory » Joe Muggs

THE 2007 REVIEW: Joe Muggs

Joe Muggs — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 22:23:26 +0000

In the year when Dubstep proved its staying power and went international, it still produced few artist albums: the mainstream of the sound still with its heart in the mixtape – but London’s Burial, Bristol’s Pinch and Nottingham’s Geiom produced absolutely brilliant spooky, soulful and brooding (respectively) takes on the sound. Further dub variations came with fizzing post-Basic Channel stuff from Germany (Disrupt) and Detroit (Echospace), while techno veteran Neil Landstrumm added the dubstep template to old-school rave on Restaurant Of Assassins.

The folktronic-indietronic-organic-electronic interface continued to be fertile, with Tunng, Muscovite producer Gultskra Artikler, Icelanders Múm, Canadian-in-London Caribou and Danes Efterklang further blurring the band/producer boundaries, while the brain-boggling Battles and Yeasayer produced a new strain of post-dance prog rock. Fennesz Sakamoto and Michaela Mélian produced some of the most beautiful pure ambient music of recent years, while the techno continuum showed its diversity with Cristian Vogel’s futurism, Supermayer’s good-natured fun, and Matthew Dear’s darkside pop. The Hot 8 Brass Band fused generations of funk to show that even near-destruction couldn’t still the heart of New Orleans, while The Black Dog’s terrifyingly rare early 90s rave-tronica tracks got a welcome re-issue.

1.

BURIAL
Untrue
Hyperdub

2.

DISRUPT
Foundation Bit
Werk Discs

3.

FENNESZ SAKAMOTO
Cendre
Touch

4.

TUNNG
Good Arrows
Full Time Hobby

5.

GULTSKRA ARTIKLER
Kasha Iz Topora
Miasmah Recordings

6.

CRISTIAN VOGEL
The Never Engine
Tresor

7.

PINCH
Underwater Dancehall
Tectonic

8.

MICHAELA MELIAN
Los Angeles
Monika Enterprise

9.

DEEPCHORD PRESENTS ECHOSPACE
Coldest Season
Modern Love

10.

SUPERMAYER
Save The World
Kompakt

11.

MATTHEW DEAR
Asa Breed
Ghostly International

12.

GEIOM
Island Noise
Berkane Sol

13.

NEIL LANDSTRUMM
Restaurant Of Assassins
Planet Mu

14.

HOT 8 BRASS BAND
Rock With The Hot 8
Tru Thoughts

15.

MÚM
Go Go Smear The Poison Ivy
Fat-Cat Records

16.

THE BLACK DOG
Book Of Dogma
Soma Quality Recordings

17.

BATTLES
Mirrored
Warp Records

18.

CARIBOU
Andorra
Merge Records

19.

YEASAYER
All Hour Cymbals
We Are Free

20.

EFTERKLANG
Parades
The Leaf Label

THE 2007 REVIEW

David Abravanel
Eleventh Volume
Max Schaefer
themilkman

GULTSKRA ARTIKLER: Kasha Iz Topora (Miasmah Recordings)

Joe Muggs — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 21:54:30 +0000

GULTSKRA ARTIKLER
Kasha Iz Topora
MIACD006
Miasmah Recordings 2007
18 Tracks. 66mins48secs

Isn’t technology beautiful? Now that even the cheapest PCs are capable – in the right hands – of sophisticated sound manipulation, the way is open for ever more peculiar people to realize the sounds in their heads no matter how far outside normal musical frames of reference they might be. No longer does a Captain Beefheart need to capture, imprison and brainwash talented young musicians in order to create a Trout Mask Replica. Instead, people with a unique vision need only lock themselves away with a computer and tweak and twist and warp whatever sounds are around them until they have an album’s worth of the sounds that will allow others access to their soundworld. Burial – if the myth is to be believed – is one such visionary, sat in his room with the TV on and an old PC with a fan so knackered it smokes, editing sound without even recourse to a sequencer in pursuit of the perfect aural painting of the fears and joys of the South London night time; and Siberian-born, Moscow-dwelling Alexey Devyanin is without doubt another.

I pick Burial and Captain Beefheart very particularly as points of reference, not because this album sounds anything like either, but precisely because none of them sound like anything else. It is possible to find certain similarities – say, in the way both Burial and Gultskra Artikler take musique concrète completely out of the realm of the academic and make manipulations of unmusical sounds completely musical, or how, like Beefheart, Devyanin manages to create an internal logic so forcefully convincing that utterly off-kilter rhythms begin to normalize themselves in your brain once you’ve immersed yourself in them.

The CD comes packaged with a booklet of collages and stories in Russian; you don’t need to read the language or look up the website to know that these are all rooted in sinister folklore, with the pictures showing bears and old faceless baboushkas lurking in shadowy woodlands, flying axes and topsy-turvy dream physics. If you do look it up, you’ll find out things about magic porridge bowls you never knew you wanted to know but are glad you do. None of which goes any further towards describing what the album actually sounds like, but all of which makes complete sense as you listen to it. The various sounds of chiming bells, creaking doors, lapping waves, frogs and other more unidentifiable but natural-sounding noises which weave around the acoustic guitars and cellos that create the main hooks of the tracks give the whole thing the air of an unfolding uneasy, surreal drama. One could imagine all manner of modern dance pieces or dark Slavic animations being done to this music, but the vital point is that it needs no illustration; the infinitesimal level of detail, the constantly-developing melodies and that vital sense that you are being immersed in the imaginings of a unique mind all mean that this album is an experience in itself, listen after listen.

Though this review so far may suggest otherwise, this album is not artwank. Neither is it clumsy ‘outsider art’ to be consumed voyeuristically. Despite Devyanin’s clear facility both with real instruments and with his software, it sounds like it comes from club/ambient music rather than from the conservatoire, with the need to keep ‘confused’ audiences engaged which that entails, so its sounds are there to be enjoyed first of all beyond any conceptual value. Its more electronic sections have all the outer-space ambient loveliness of early KLF or Orb, and even as the atmosphere darkens the clanks, bangs and radio crackles are there for emotional effect rather than to be endured. If you’ve ever had a bus-ride transformed by a great ambient record on headphones, if you’ve ever felt the otherworldliness of the peculiar indietronica lyricism of bands like Múm or Efterklang, or simply if you need to be reminded that there are still visionary minds out there producing music, then I can’t recommend this album enough.

4.7/5

Gultskra Artikler | Miasmah Recordings
Buy: CD

NOMADIC: Trek 19 (Touchin’ Bass)

Joe Muggs — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 21:19:39 +0000

NOMADIC
Trek 19
TB030CD
Touchin’ Bass 2007
10 Tracks. 57mins01secs

DJ/producer Andrea Parker’s label usually specialises in a kind of very psychedelic and very high-tech sounding underground electro, so at first listen this extremely rough’n'ready album seems like something of a diversion for them. However, although the crunch and buzz of the individual sounds on Trek 19 are superficially punkier and more violent than Touchin’ Bass’s usual fare (indeed frequently it recalls some of The Aphex Twin’s earliest, rawest Rephlex 12″ excursion into piledriving noise under Caustic Window and other such names), a couple of listens through and it becomes very clear that the heart and soul of this album is electro – funky, body-popping, head-spinning, robo-funk electro indebted to Kraftwerk and the Soul Sonic Force – just as much as any previous releases on the label are.

Nomadic is Cuban-born Alain Hernandez – and once you learn from his biography that he grew up on the streets of Miami trying to replicate classic hip-hop on the most rudimentary of sampling keyboards, everything falls into place. From his roots using minimal resources, without studios and digital FX units, Hernandez clearly had to make every single sound count – which is why, instead of allowing sounds to phase and warp as in so many contemporary electro records, this album relies entirely of the bite of the individual sounds and steady, subtle variation in the rhythm programming to move the tracks forward.

And they do drive forward: like those early Aphex tracks, or like mid-period Autechre before they began to deconstruct themselves entirely, though the jagged edges of the sounds can create an uneasy atmosphere redolent of the first Alien film with its bare wires, rust and acid burns, the rhythms are so physical, so bodily, that the innate funk imbued by their electro DNA makes the whole hugely appealing. The mournful synth and piano melodies that wind themselves around the beats are merely window-dressing: yes, they sugar the pill a little bit, but it’s the head-nodding, butt-wiggling funk of it all that is what will draw you into this album if anything does.

3.9/5

Touchin Bass
Buy: CD | iTunes