REVIEWS August, 2003


ABOUT THIS PRODUCT- "Trash Art"
CD Phthalo
Though largely ignored in their hometown, this young Houston laptop duo found a sympathetic ally in Phthalo's Dimitri Fergadis. After witnessing a characteristically energetic and chaotic About This Product performance Fergadis offered to release their debut CD on the spot. Most of the tracks on this debut, recorded between 1999 and the present, offer up a well balanced mix of rhythm, noise and melody that flow with an organic logic that bears repeated listens. Phthalo is an appropriate home for ATP- their ever-shifting crunchy rhythms, bleepy/chirpy synth-like tones, and gritty density of noise bear more than a passing resemblance to Fergadis classics like "Navy Warship" and "Zacks". Another reference point might be Team Doyobi's scrambled bleepcore (minus the funk) but with a slightly harsher, frantic edge. Doomy synth tones, clipped beats and grainy digital textures coupled with a sense of unease add up to a pretty solid debut.

CDATAKILL- "Severity of Gravity" EP
ABELCAIN vs CDATAKILL- "Playing with Knives" EP
12" Low Res
Cdatakill joins the Low Res roster with a four track EP of his trademark symphonic breakcore plus a few surprises. "Nothing Can Damn My Soul" opens with a spoken word intro through 4x4 rhythms and settles into a dark acid drill'n'bass groove. "Imperial Passage" and "Surveillance Tape" mix shimmering ambient backdrops with midtempo funk and faster hammering jungle breaks. "Strange Fruit" is the change-up, as jazz piano and smoky echoes disintegrate into deep, bass-heavy ambience over which a super-slow dubbed out beat emerges. A clanking drill'n'bass loop startles the listener before the Billie Holliday sample reveals this as, indeed, a cover of Holliday's downer blues classic. It's an awkward track, very daring and admirable but the fast beats never really mesh with the mood of the dirge-like original. The "Playing With Knives" EP matches Cdatakill with fellow midwesterner Abelcain for a set of remixes. This duo was previously seen together on the "Stiz Stigmata" split 12" on Zhark. Abelcain takes on two cuts from "Severity of Gravity" and speeds up the tempo with dirty bass and even dirtier cut-up beats. Cdatakill tackles tracks from Abelcain's "Faust" EP (Low Res) mixing dense claustrophobic dub on one piece and angelic choir dread on the Popol Vuh / Aguirre tribute "Der Zorn Gottes".

DJ ANONYMOUS- "Riggen Beats Ala Erwood "
12" Anonymous
Another new Milwaukee label debuts with this banging 12" from DJ Anonymous, a frequent Doormouse collaborator. "Ask Me", which takes up one side is complex jungle rhythms with a dirty funk intro and outro and a few hammering gabber-ish interludes. Smooth and clean productions hits hard without getting distorted. On the flipside, Doormouse helps out on "Full Frontal Face Fire", an odd-timed stop-start bit of cut-and-paste funk apparently made with nothing but samples of Richard Pryor- though I could swear I hear Jim Nabors in there somewhere. "Dr. Logic" is a chunky mid-tempo number that cranks up the distortion a bit, especially on the depth-charge drums that weave through a maze of raw jazz-funk samples. Some weird strangled rapping ("listen to my voice / you were born to die") makes this perhaps the standout track. Distributed through soundclash.net

DOORMOUSE- "Freaked Out Mess"
CD Addict Records
Milwaukee hardcore veteran Doormouse presents a pretty solid full-length effort that mixes jungle, hiphop, funk, hardcore, gabber and breakcore in ways that are subtler than the "Freaked Out Mess" title might indicate. Beyond the scatological humor lies some great skill in constructing some very dense and deeply funky tracks out of an endless variety of sampled fragments. In that sense he (and maybe the whole Milwaukee hardcore crew) are the electronic equivalents of Frank Zappa- leavening some fairly complex music with cheap toilet jokes. Most of the tracks on here play like a smart-ass, nihilistic Amon Tobin as enamored of gabber as he is of Brazilian percussion. But I can't think of too many electronic producers who would sample trucker poetry legend Red Sovine. A light touch on the distortion makes this a pretty good entry point into the Addict label discography. The big finale is a noisy re-working of Sabbath's "War Pigs" which sees Ozzy being flushed down the drain while breakbeats and clipped fuzz-bass explode all around him. Contact:

M2- "War of Sound"
CD Ant-Zen
M2 (pronounced "squaremeter") is the glitchy, minimal alter-ego of Mathis Mootz, much better known as Panacea. "War of Sound" is already the sixth M2 album by the hyper-prolific Mootz. Using a sound palette similar to that of Ryoji Ikeda or Carsten Nicolai, Mootz livens up the clinical sinewaves and clipped bass tones with sweeping bombastic synths, spooky samples, gurgling sequencers and wide screen sound effects. The result is a bit like a Tangerine Dream soundtrack gone microsound- very bizarre and unexpected. Adding to the odd and "over the top" quality of this release are some track titles that really belong on a metal album - "The Cry Of Morgoth", "The Scourges Of Fire", "In Ages Forgotten". If that weren't strange enough, and keeping with the metal theme, the vocal sound bites sprinkled throughout are taken from J.R.R. Tolkien. These vocal samples are repeated endlessly throughout any given track's (considerable) length, making the whole album a bit of a difficult listen, in spite of some occasionally decent sounds and textures.

KERO- "Firewire Funk"
12" Low Res
Kero is Windsor-born Sohail Azad, who has previous 12" and full length releases on Bpitch Control and Shitkatapult. This 12" on Detroit's Low Res is a masterpiece of swirling digital techno-funk. Funk is the key- as each one of these four tracks is powered by relentless dance floor grooves. Azad has quite a knack for highly detailed ever-evolving textures along the lines of Richard Devine or recent Autechre. But tracks like the crunchy "tcp/ip-sync" and the Super_Collider-esque "Terrorbyte" move the head-bopping beats to the forefront more along the lines of Neil Landstrumm. Best track on here might be "Pixelpimp", with its slowly building density, rich walls-of-synths, and neck-breaking, body-popping beat.

LOESS- "12BC"
12" Nonresponse
Loess is the Philadelphia duo of Clay Emerson and Ian Pullman, and this is their first vinyl release after a couple of CDs, also on Nonresponse. On the two tracks that take up this EPs length, Emerson and Pullman conjure up some interesting textures swimming under their laidback beats. On "Troper", a scratchy noise introduction gives way to a nice melody that flows through some gritty but always mellow textures. The beats on this track are simple Autechre-ish electro rhythms, perhaps a bit too simple in contrast to the background. "Cyanor" adds a bit of welcome crunch to the rhythmic sounds. The beat on this track loops almost uninterrupted and unvaried throughout the track's length- a change-up here and there would have been nice. Again, there are some good sounds at play, but both tracks lack a little extra "oomph" to make them stand out.

SET FIRE TO FLAMES- "Telegraphs in Negative / Mouths Trapped in Static"
2CD FatCat 2003
The second album from Montreal's Set Fire To Flames is a bit of a sprawling mess. This is no bad thing- you sort of expect as much from a two disc set by a crew of 13 playing cello, viola, violin, French horn, bass clarinet, electric bass, multiple guitars, electronics and location recordings. The tracks, though certainly dense at times never seems to feature all 13 playing at once- the musicians flow in and out of pieces that are certainly composed- either beforehand or afterwards in the studio. The location recordings take the form of scratchy vinyl-surface-like noise, street ambience, nature sounds and even what sounds like a person getting into a car. There are a couple of side-trips into some zonked found conversations/rants and I found those bits almost unlistenable- I don't really see the attraction. I was able to find about 5 tracks that are simply stunning and would have made a fantastic single-disc album. As with the (related) Godspeed You Black Emperor I prefer when they strum their guitars as opposed to when they pick them. When the guitars are picked the results sound too much like an epic spaghetti western soundtrack- and the overall feel has a certain kitschy and cheesy effect that I'm certain was probably not intentional- though one never knows with this mysterious bunch. Obviously the music will affect different listeners in many ways but when the guitars soar I find myself smiling at the silliness and calculated melodrama of it all. The aptly titled "fukt perkussiv" is my favorite track on here- strummed guitar bangs out a monotonous rhythm over primitive percussion. The mix is sparse and I'm reminded of a cross between Faust's "Rainy Day Sunshine Girl" and "Disaster"-era Amon Duul. Guitar fuzz is panned hard as the strums build into a very tasty two-note riff. This is one track I wish would go on forever- as it is, it only lasts 8 minutes. The 15-minute "In Prelight Isolate" begins with abstract guitar plucking and a "free-improv" feel- very slow and stark. The cello begins to fade into the mix very slowly and subtly as the rich sound of a bass clarinet begins to swirl in the background. The string instruments sound like feedback whistles as spare percussion begins to flow in. The string sawing continues through all this, rising and building. Some bass-heavy sonorities come to the fore as the track begins to wind down to the finish. Stunning. Tracks that feature the string section or the bass clarinet are usually more attractive than the ones that don't- the string section adds a shimmering aura that is very attractive. Most of these tracks were recorded over the course of five days in a "collapsing barn" and then digitally edited in the studio. Whatever the process was, the sound is very impressive. The mix is very clear and defined but with enough dirt applied judiciously to keep the music from sounding too pristine.

TOMORROW I AM GOING TO DO IT- "REGRET instruction manual issue 2"
CD Addict Records
This is an odd CD from Stuntrock, perhaps the oddest member of Milwaukee's hardcore scene. Normally heard making cynical cut-and-paste nihilistic gabber, breakcore and noise, this full-length presents a user-friendly mix of wistful sampled melodies, downtempo hiphop beats and found voices from movies, TV and old records. Stuntrock's cynicism remains intact- though the general mood here is one of anguish, regret, self-doubt and self-loathing. Voices swim through the gritty mix telling us "what difference is that gonna make?", "I just want to get out of here", "I see what's in front of me that's why I look back", "There is no harmony in the universe". There is something about the scratchy, blurry sampled quality of the music (and a quote in the accompanying booklet: "how my mom's vinyl collection saved my life") that makes me think of the Anticon crew. But this is pretty much its own thing- the sad and catchy melodies played under a relentless succession of depressing vocal samples works very well. The accompanying booklet deserves a review of its own- fashioned as a self-help manual it is easily the most hilarious thing I've seen or read in years.

VARIOUS ARTISTS- "Merzbow Frog: Remixed and Revisited"
2xCD Misanthropic Agenda
Attractively packaged in a beautiful color folder, Misanthropic Agenda gathers a mix of noiseheads, Mego big-wigs, stoner drone-rockers, and unknowns to remix Merzbow's "Frog" LP from 2001. The unknowns (to me) do very well- especially Never Presence Forever who slows everything down to a bass-hum crawl- taking out the distortion in a manner akin to what Heemann did in his (great) Merzbow collaboration disc. Similarly, House of Low Culture takes another unexpected route, offering up subtle low-volume scrapes very carefully edited. The best piece on here might be the opener, where Hrvatski offers an INA/GRM flavored workout full of rapid fade-ins and fade-outs punctuated by mysterious silences. More along the lines of what you would expect from a Merz remix is John Weise's expertly cut-up harshness that, at first, jumps out of the speakers and then descends into a sparse and quiet unease of softly clipped sounds that startlingly explode back into loudness. Sunno))) play with loops, CD-skips and tape hiss building up to a dense mess floating over a rich sustained amp hum. Fennesz adds a two-note melody that softens the harshness, while Rusell Haswell mixes sparse grainy digital textures and blips to good effect. Hecker picks up where Haswell left off with a quiet mix through which sudden bursts of distortion struggle to explode. The track slowly builds up to massive noise roar that is well balanced in the bass department. Other remixers include Pita, Terror Organ, Ulver, Boris, When, Misanthropic Agenda label-owner Gerritt and Masami Akita himself.