One for the pounding darkside fans. Bkey adds urban jungle noises to his bump ‘n’ grind, Mason and Armanni Reign get panicky on “Firemin,” and Mindmachine delivers some trippy trance-meets-Hardware sounds on “Angst.” Finally, Dylan blends hip-hop, pitched-down Amens, and classical music touches to create a ’95 vibe.
Bigshot Eq
Eight-bar fans tune in to “EQ,” full of droning bassline goodness, “frequency” samples, and someone sawing away on an eerily high-pitched violin; for some reason, it’s vaguely reminiscent of “War in ’94.” Flip for jamming 4/4s mixed up with almost ’60s-esque organ sounds on the pounding “A Little Different.” Haunted house vibes.
Curse Ov Dialect Lost In the Real Sky
Lost In The Real Sky puts Australia on the hip-hop map with a polyglot bang. Taking fellow Oz group the Avalanches’ playful sampladelic spirit to much stranger places, Curse Ov Dialect’s five core MCs/producers often cram more ideas into one track than many artists muster in their entire careers. Lost contains a dizzying range of musical styles, as well as multiple layers of ill subliminals; imagine the Bomb Squad’s intricately crafted chaos informed by Nonesuch’s Explorer Series and surrealism. The disc’s panoply of conscious rappers with odd flows further spices this global melting pot. <i.Lost’s kaleidoscopic data-OD is true next-level shit.
Josh Wink Profound Soundds Vol. 2
A former pop star abroad, Philly’s Josh Wink has plummeted back to Earth as merely a competent producer of old-school acid trax and a supreme selector of psychedelic, minimalist tech-house. This strong follow up to 1999’s Profound Sounds Vol. 1 DJ-mix disc resembles Richie Hawtin’s DE9; both use Final Scratch technology to personalize each track in the mix. So when you freak out to cuts on Profound Sounds Vol. 2 by Johannes Heil, Dave Clarke, Villalobos, Timeblind and Swayzak, you’re actually hearing Wink’s tailor-made retooling of them. The bonus CD contains four Wink-produced tracks from vinyl-only releases and video footage.
Cabaret Voltaire Methodology ’74/’78: Attic Tapes
Over three CDs and 53 tracks, Methodology unveils Cabaret Voltaire’s earliest experiments with electronics. Through radical manipulations of voices and instruments, Sheffield, England’s Chris Watson, Richard H. Kirk and Stephen Mallinder restlessly developed the phonemes of a sonic vocabulary that would coalesce into the viral language heard on their bleak, industrial-electrofunk classics Red Mecca and 2 X 45. But before those refinements came and before they embraced rhythm and Burroughsian paranoia, Cabaret Voltaire diabolically schemed in the studio like pre-Autobahn Kraftwerk, forging bizarrely bleeping abstractions akin to Gil Melle’s Andromeda Strain soundtrack and elaborating on the timbral mutations pioneered by Tod Dockstader and Morton Subotnick. This boxed set is both a revelatory peak into a crucial electronic group’s embryonic stage, and a key chapter in electronic music’s evolution in the ’70s, a decade that (contrary to conventional wisdom) abounded with innovation-as did Cabaret Voltaire.
Jirku/Judge Plusism
With a title like Plusism, this album should be bustling with maximal activity. But no: Toronto producers Tomas Jirku and Robin Judge are minimalists to the core. Furthermore, they have Basic Channel/Chain Reaction DNA running through their laptops. Jirku/Judge fuse the Germans’ reduction of dub’s sonic fragmentation and illusion-mongering to a smorgasbord of clicks-and-cuts-y tonal smudging, then send them all on their merry way with gliding, restrained 4/4 beats, like Process with an excess of rum in his belly. Jirku/Judge’s music is easy to peg, but that doesn’t make it any less interesting or rewarding.
HIM Many In High Places Are Not Well
HiM’s last album, New Features (2001), valiantly attempted to weld Miles Davis’s early-’70s funkadelia to Fela Kuti’s Mantric Afrobeat. On HIM’s sixth album, Many In High Places Are Not Well, leader/master percussionist Doug Scharin continues to plow Africa’s fecund polyrhythmic fields, but this time he mutes the pace and intensity. But more mature-sounding doesn’t equal dullness, not with ringers like Senegalese kora player Abdou M’boup, slide guitarist Joe Goldring and cornetist Rob Mazurek lavishing divine textures onto this disc’s seven tracks. While some may miss HiM’s skewed dub roots, High Places finds the band occupying lofty ground between Talking Heads’ Remain In Lightand Antibalas.
Family Tree Virgo Iomos Marad Each 1 Teach 1
Chicago’s All Natural label continues to realize its dreams. Accompanying the uplifting Family Tree album track “Push, Move Build” is DJ Spinna’s opaque remix of “Virgo” (featuring MCs Mr. Greenweedz and the effervescent Rita J.), and the huge previously unreleased battle track “Regardless,” featuring Prime and Daily Plannet, with hot cuts by Madd Crates. Meanwhile, MC Iomos Marad offers three tracks of primo now-school conscious rhymes off his new album, Deep Rooted, highlighted by “Appetite to Write” featuring J Live. Quite simply, this is the real hip-hop. “
Todd Buckler Pillowtalk
New Englander Buckler throws down the gauntlet with a couple of burners. The title track surrounds a mournful cello melody with chunky “Bambaataa”-esque beats before crunching into three-chord punk ‘n’ bass land. A more sinewy mood pervades the flip’s Amen-heavy “Cold,” although the meat of the tune offers some distractingly fuzzy production.
Soussol Take Control Mas
Dare anyone try to improve on a house classic like JM Silk’s foundational 1987 track “Let the Music Take Control”? In his Soussol guise, Chicago’s Richard Gow does indeed, weaving piano and flute extracts from the original into his rich, dub-tinged version, which Brit producer Chris Simmonds augments with a tighter rub. And although satisfactory, the flip’s jazz-housey “Backwards Motion” doesn’t quite measure up to the dancefloor power of the a-side.
