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Think electronica, think punk attitude…

A couple of EP reviews I’ve written recently for Connexion Bizarre…

Andrew.

Heft vs. Scaffolding – We Will Diminish

The first release on the Plastic Sound Supply label — currently available for free from the label’s website! — this four-tracker contains one dancefloor number and one more experimental track from each act. ‘Dose’ and ‘Mound’ are both 4-to-the-floor brain techno in the 130 BPM area, which (perhaps not coincidentally) mix into each other rather nicely. The former (Heft’s track) pushes the envelope a little further, mashing the beats up occasionally to resemble whatever the techno equivalent of breakcore would be.

The other two tracks are complete departures compared to the relative orthodoxy of the two club tunes. Scaffolding’s ‘Attempt’ sounds a little like Broken Note’s ambient builds, with occasional spare machine beats punctuating a thoroughly apocalyptic electronic soundscape. You can imagine music like this to be the cornerstone of Skynet’s internal playlist while it crushes the puny human rebellion.  Heft’s ‘Waves Upon Waves’, on the other hand, sets a sensuous female vocalist to a sinister, slightly glitchy but huge and melodramatic trip-hop beat. Think Recoil, lightly remixed by Funkstörung.

Both artists are faultlessly professional, and the label deserves cred for putting two very leftfield tracks on the same release as two much more conventional slices of DJ fodder. And then giving it away for free…

CacheFlowe – Cache, Stacks & Queues EP

Hailing from Colorado, via the Plastic Sound Supply label, CacheFlow makes hip-hop-tinged dubstep, avoiding the dirtier fringes of that genre in favour of more rounded analogue-style sounds and futuristic IDM glitch-beats. This digital EP, available on CD soon, is a showcase for ‘FloweBot’, a collaboration with rapper Brer Rabbit of the Flobots. Four mixes are provided. Alongside the original and an instrumental dub, Starkey replaces the wobbly minimalism of the original mix with a more trebly hip-hop production style, and Machinedrum strips out all but the vocals and backs them with a downbeat loop-based arrangement.

Also included are three additional tracks. Oh! Dub explores a more traditional dub sound, with a double-speed rhythm that starts all garagey and ends up almost in ska territory. Crunch Dub is a little darker, retaining the glossy synth sounds, and Imperial Bombin’ features pitched up vocal samples croaking about warfare over a lazy, almost horizontal backbeat. Given a 6 mainly for the forward-looking production, but it’s a all little too happy and major-key to really chime with me, despite plenty of opportunities to go much, much ruder.

I will be DJing here in a few weeks (click for bigger):

Slaughterhaus Five — Restoration

7th March 2009

Music from:

Lydia Dischordia, Mark 13, Operon, Miss Glitch

In the mix: Vex’d, Broken Note, Wasteland, Download, Scorn, Enduser, SPL, Antigen Shift, Mimetic, Black Lung, Shackleton, Architect etc. (that’s just from me)

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