Despite the disdain showered upon acid jazz’s chin bearded-and-knit capped devotees, the scene has left us with some prolific artists. Producer Demus (of early ’90s UK soul act Young Disciples) and Rob Gallagher (Galliano) are two that have gone on to produce solid work with the likes of Koop, Zero 7 and Jazzanova. On their second full-length as 2BO4, the pair, joined by vocalists like Bembe Segue and Valerie Etienne, brings forth an album full of accomplished jazz-tinged soul that successfully avoids ponderous pretension. With a serious yet warm timbre and loping chords that recall late-Sixties-era Yusef Lateef, Three Streets World has an intimate tone that reveals more with repeated listens. The album is full of heartfelt playing from seasoned veterans like Ski Oakenfull and Chris Bowden, and shines when 2BO4 avoid too much drama, as on the simple but effective Angel’s Walk” or the rolling title track.
Abstract Rude and Tribe Unique Showtyme
With an exhaustive guest list that includes everyone from Aceyalone to Zulu Butterfly, Abstract Rude and Tribe Unique’s latest is anything but the nitty-gritty. Which makes the listening experience alternately enthralling and enervating. There could always be a spitfire joint around the next bend like “Flow and Tell” (which features AWOL One, 2 Mex and Busdriver), but more likely it’s a scattershot beat strung haphazardly to tepid vocals, as in the flat “Before We Gone” with singer Kia Kadiri. Showtyme is funky, but not consistently so-it doesn’t always behoove an artist to have a hype guest list, especially when some of your guests outpace you.
Various The Mic Planet Sessions
You can’t step to the Mic Planet-it’s a jam-packed party for a writer who stays at home and smokes too much. Overall, this compilation’s lyrically, percussively and poetically solid. If alliterative phrases and a swank beat amount to sex appeal, then Breez Evahflowin (“Mic Planet Session 101”) and Styles of Beyond (“Atomic Zen”) get the playas of the year award. Mystic flaunts her poetic steez in “Current Events,” even if she gets her jollies knockin’ the hustle. And for the record’mmortal Technique ain’t no misogynist-he just likes to massage the word. “
Matthew Dear Dog Days
This first single from Matthew Dear’s forthcoming Spectral album Leave Luck to Heaven is smart, minimal and as poppy as an Afghan opium field. “Pantytec” resculpts it as a bulbous balloon of low-end kick. It must be said, then: dog days are here again. And thanks for that.
Various Futuristic Experiments #6
Like Kompakt’s Total series, Background’s Futuristic Experiments installments always pair svelte microhouse with a healthy amount of playful experimentation. The 11 artists featured here, among them Ben Nevile, B., Si-Cut.Db and label proprietor Andy Vaz, make for the series’ finest hour yet. Akufen’s “Red Skies” eschews his trademark cut-ups for a sub-aquatic French shuffle-house workout. Sutekh’s stuttering “Keep Away” is paradoxically inviting, and Portable’s “A Loop of Mass & Energy” loses the beat in favor of sub-bass ambient dub. Excellent.
Dilo! Perez Projects
A brilliant little oddity from SF visual artist Eamon Ore-Giron accompanied by Nortec associate Julio Cesar Morales. Dilo takes to Perez Prado the way Aphex Twin takes to insanity. Acknowledging Miami bass, dancehall, smart techno and splattercore without indulging in formula, “Perez Projects” is one of the most pleasant surprises of the year. “
The Rapture Echoes
Not since the Stone Roses unleashed Fools Gold in 1989 on a world waiting for Anglo dance catharsis has a band been so hailed as the future for fusing the aesthetics of rock and the discotheque. As such, the timing of the release of The Rapture’s “House of Jealous Lovers” single was undeniable. And now, after pages and pages of hype, we have the album. Unsurprisingly, Echoes is ambitious in scope and accomplished in style. Tracks like “Olio,” which sounds like The Cure reworked by 808 State, and “Heaven,” which once again plunders Gang of Four sans social critique, deliver exactly what you’d expect. The album’s oddity-the Bowie-esque “Open Up Your Heart”-offers the only unexpected treat. Even so, it’s hard not to feel every song is transparent in its postured mimicry. Echoes is far from unpleasing, but it seems we should expect a bit more from the future than Karaoke at the No Wave runway.
Fennesz Live In Japan
Many critics portray Christian Fennesz as the guy who digitized the Beach Boys on his 2001 landmark, Endless Summer. But this live document from February 2003 attests that his heart is not for the surfer girl. Live is a 45-minute stream of loops, where acoustic guitar melodies and organ timbres scatter like autumn leaves under a gale wind of static and scrambled microtones. The opening number’s smeared distortion steams like rain on Times Square neon. Also emerging from the mire is a guitar riff reminiscent of Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time.” The anticipation for Fennesz’s upcoming album, Venice, just keeps getting worse.
Matmos The Civil War
Matmos’s bouts of tomfuckery-like recording the scrapes of a rhinoplasty operation, or a duet between an electric guitar and a bucket of oatmeal-all deserve a prize. In The Civil War, they attempt a musical time warp between the English and American civil wars. It’s a near-sequel to their 1999 peyote ‘n’ jimson weed-laced trip, The West, with its banjos, fiddles and dobro guitars. However, things are “civil” here, where Weather Channel-friendly country-folk abounds. Fortunately, “Regicide,” and “Z.O.C.K.” both imitate the joy of Puritans kicking around King Charles I’s head, while “Pelt and Holler” is vintage Matmos with its DSP mutation of a rabbit pelt into a maracas-like shaker.
Various Anthology Of Noise and Electronic Music: 1936-2003
Guy-Marc Hinant has serious balls to throw a Captain Beefheart spoken word track in among a score of pioneering musique concrete, feedback and drone composers in his latest “a-chronology” for Sub Rosa. Here, 30- to 50-year-old compositions by wildmen like Luc Ferrari, Morton Subotnick, Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening make featured new jacks Autechre and Scanner sound awfully ascetic. Other highlights: Daphne Oram’s lucid harmonics, David Lynch prot?g? Alan R. Splet’s Eraserhead-style refrigerator drones, and Laibach’s factory tour of communist Yugoslavia. This comp will have you shaking hands with a few greats who were otherwise lost in the crowd’s rush to kiss the feet of Cage and Stockhausen.
