Brazilian chanteuse Cibelle first came to prominence as the principal vocalist on Suba’s seminal Sao Paulo Confessions LP. In the last two years, she’s been busy with Brazilian producer Apollo 9 and a host of live musicians, working out her own musical agenda. The resultant LP is as accomplished and alluring as you’d expect from a lady who has immersed herself in every kind of music from classical and jazz, Afro-Brazilian and electronic. Consciously detailed and elegantly refined, this is a captivating set of songs that seduce with their subtlety and mark out a serious new talent.
Tim Vitek Strange Revival
The revolution is here and Vitek is at the forefront. Futuristic vocal techno-punk on the original mix, while the MFV mix adds a guitar sample and aids the cause. The Shreve mix focuses on heavy industrial percussion and aggressive bass shifts, as Tommie Sunshine adds dirty synths and interesting samples to an otherwise broken beat.
Various Framed & Formed
Deep Five is Scott Findley’s first appearance on Iron Box. Thick bass tones, smooth synths and tight percussion-an excellent production! Chicago’s Soultek picks up where he left off on the last release, with a thick, deep groove and spaced-out sounds. My personal favorite is Brian Aneurysm’s “Ignore Me”-cool hits and vocals over a jacked-up “gr.”
Fertile Ground Remixed
Earning plaudits from London’s soul jazz cognoscenti, this Baltimore group’s infectious use of Afro-Caribbean rhythms has made them a favorite of those on a syncopated slant, evidenced here by their remixers. Kaidi Tatham turns in an ambitious, tempo-dividing version of “Spiritual War,” maintaining careful d?tente with Navasha Daya’s vocals. Her powerful voice does get the best of Ayro on “The Moment,” however, especially in comparison to Seiji’s shuffling funk version. Jazztronik’s “Peace & Love” channels Zero dB with batacuda-laden flavor, and Waiwan’s “Take Me Higher” is a brilliant bit of future jazz. Worthy companions to the originals.
Tony Thomas 21st Century Dub
Towards the end of those warehouse days of glory, some DJs played a chunky mix of beats-stripped down and tribal, with an organic funk and an unrelenting assault of bongos. Tony Thomas’s debut album for Soma hearkens back to that tribal house heyday with its steady pulse, echoes of African chants, and those ever-present bongos. Thomas’s is a toughened up version-sleeker and techier, and as the title suggests, he hasn’t forgotten the bassline. The CD (unlike the LP) is a constant mix, and while the tracks tend to all mine the same vein, as dancefloor material it’s perfect. Put it on and sweat.
Christian Smith Live @ Womb (The sound of Tronic Treatment)
Question for Mr. Smith: We know you can get super-nasty on the decks, so do we really need to hear the self-aggrandizing applause from your crowd to further confirm what we already know? Recorded live at Tokyo’s Womb, complete with enthusiastic audience participation (and some annoying audio feedback), Live @ Womb is a raucous ride through wicked techno and funky tech-house territory. Every track is pure floor-demolishing heaven. It has its audio flaws, but they add to the magic. Womb… is live and spontaneous and Smith massages a tune just right.
Various Lost On Arrival
Naked Music, purveyors of elegant, yet visceral vocal house, decides to take a leftfield detour, taking hints from their three-volume Carte Blanche series. Not all the tracks are stormers, but there are more than enough highlights courtesy of the likes of Chicken Lips, Trentemoller and Morgan Geist. If Lost… is a taste of things to come from Naked, this could herald a new and exciting phase. Here’s to innovation and huge, dangly cojones!
Kagami Star Arts
Four years have elapsed since Kagami’s last album, and it shows. As he shamelessly hops aboard the electro bandwagon, he’s still carrying major disco filter and tired hard-house baggage. The only time he redeems himself is five cuts in on “2.27” and on the eighth track, “Perfect Storm.” While these two techno offerings are decent fillers, they’re sadly out of place on this paean to mediocrity. It’s cold comfort that the tracks, despite their staleness, are really well produced. It’s just that they’re so indicative of the shite out there that you hardly care. Maybe in another four years Kagami will live up to his hype.
Various 4 years
Canadian design firm Wabi digs on all things minimal-both in music and graphic imagery. 4 Years is a retrospective of microtech music created mostly by Canadian producers for use in Wabi’s live sight-and-sound events. Artists such as Fairmont, and British Columbia’s Nassau weave subtle mumbled vocals and steady throbbing sequences, while Polmo Polpo’s “Losing My Tentacles” blurs numerous post-techno and ambient subgenres, anchoring them to beats that escape from funk’s humid regions to cooler climates. Dub is an essential ingredient throughout, and this collection reverberates with all the Jamaican flourishes you can muster out of its curt frequencies. Wabi’s ability to pimp excellence from an international gamut of minimalists is a sign that a label may be imminent.
Arundhati Roy Come September
At a time when liberals the world over are falling in line with the Bush Administration’s atrocious state practices that get called the “War on Terrorism,” the voice of Arundhati Roy is needed, and needed badly. Roy is unafraid to break with both liberal and left pieties, whereas most commentators shuffle their feet and avoid confronting “merely political” issues that hurt, devalue, and cheapen people’s lives. Tackling so-called “multiculturalism,” Roy speaks to the ways that a politics of “tolerance” assumes the other person is intolerable to begin with. One of Roy’s most startling images is this statement about nationalism: “Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.” Her poetic and political powers are inseparable.
