Cyclic Defrost Magazine |  |
- The Phenomenal Handclap Band – The Phenomenal Handclap Band (Pod/Inertia)
- Dak – Standthis (Leaving Records)
- Yvat – Kunzite (Boltfish)
- “Extended Spotlight – New Zealand” – Extended Playlist 070909 – www.2ser.com 107.3FM
- Paradigm Shift Radioshow Playlist 7 Sep 09
- Wach – Firedance On A Dead Man’s Grave (Beverina & War)
- Wisp – The Shimmering Hour (Rephlex/Inertia)
| The Phenomenal Handclap Band – The Phenomenal Handclap Band (Pod/Inertia) Posted: 09 Sep 2009 12:20 AM PDT
Note to Editors: I don’t know that I’m the best reviewer to send these pastiches of lite-white funk made by ultra-cool dance types who have picked up instruments. Doesn’t anyone remember the debate my review of Whitest Boy Alive caused a few months back? The name is an awesome start, though – The Phenomenal Handclap Band. And the album has a reasonable diversity to help it along. A vaguely psychedelic intro on ‘The Journey To Serra De Estrela’ is promising, but then it comes crashing down into whiny synth improv with plenty of pitch-wheel action, disco drums and unison bass/guitar/keyboard licks. I’m sorry, but I just can’t enjoy it. This segues, via the sound of wind (concept album anybody?), into almost pure Supertramp territory on ‘All Of The Above’, exacerbated by fey vocals. The album then flips between tasteful, mid-tempo guitar noodling, and polite disco with guitar noodling. The album’s one great moment is also proof why it was a good thing for the 70s to end and the 80s to kick in. ‘15 To 20′ featuring Lady Tigra goes for the Blondie hip-hop angle (even down to the background bells from ‘Rapture’) and succeeds. Significantly, guitar and keyboard indulgence is replaced by repetitive, skipping girl rhymes (I’ve since been told that the track accompanies the most recent Bonds advertisement here in Australia – and it makes sense, it’s a catchy track). ‘Dim The Lights’ follows with an attractive shuffle, heading into T-Rex territory. From there the album heads back into blends of West-Coast smooth, gentle funk and general 70s blandness. The whole Phenomenal Handclap Band phenomenon is being marketed as the latest New York sensation, based around former DJs Daniel Collas and Sean Marquand. While they share a sense of retro with lots of exciting things that have come out of that city over the last decade, the particular sounds they’ve chosen to revive were fairly anæmic to begin with and, with a couple of notable exceptions, haven’t really been improved on this album. Adrian Elmer |
| Dak – Standthis (Leaving Records) Posted: 09 Sep 2009 12:00 AM PDT
A while back I was switched on to one of Matthew David’s projects – Leaving Records – and this is my first acquisition. It’s a limited edition run of 100 cassettes (mine being no.42). The label has a very specific orientation, which can be sampled in more detail by downloading this mix. This tape contains 21 tracks from the currently LA based producer. The easiest way to explain it would be to make a bunch of comparisons to vaguely similar producers, but that wouldn’t do it justice. It’s sample based, choppy, slightly A.D.D. and sits mostly in a head nod tempo, but it all comes together in a way that’s a little different to the beat experiments most readers will be familiar with. There’s synths, but it’s all very organic – there’s beats, but it’s never just about kicks and snares – there’s flipped jazz samples, but it’s never derivative. It’s always texturally rich, and full of harmonic toying; the whole mix sort of twitches with a nervous energy that’s very infectious. At points the mix abandons it’s digestible lope and descends into a sort of free jazz drum malaise, and at other times falls away into interludes with someone (who may or may not be Dak) mumbling strange poignant things about the music over it. This is something absolutely worth checking out, for anyone interested in beats, psychedelia, sample based production, the much hyped LA scene, or just great new music. If there’s any left, order here. Tom Smith |
| Posted: 08 Sep 2009 11:51 PM PDT
Over the last ten years, Romanian electronic producer Octavian Justinian Uta (aka Yvat) has managed to release material at a dizzyingly prolific work rate, despite the fact that he balances his musical activities with a day job as a professional sound designer for Power FX. While earlier albums such as 2003’s Concert For Violin and Analogue Orchestra saw Uta working with heavily processed violins and analogue synth tones, subsequent releases such as 2006’s Chroma for G6PD have seen him moving towards more melodic, meticulously processed IDM landscapes. This latest album Kunzite – his first for Boltfish – arrives just a few months after his preceding Gliae collection for G6PD, and in many ways sees Uta picking up stylistically more or less from where that previous impressive album left off. As with Gliae, the most obvious influential reference points here are Tri Repetae-era Autechre and Chris Clark’s earlier Warp material. With icy, highly detailed tracks such as ‘Augen Gneiss’ and ‘Syncline’ balancing sharp-edged, coiled and meticulously sculpted broken rhythms with the wash of forlorn melodic synth pads, the entire resulting hybrid rolls with a sense of underlying hip-hop swagger. It’s precisely this soft / harsh dynamic that Uta explores further on tracks such as the delicate yet thorned ‘Corymb’ – while the accompanying synth melodies that lurk in the background are almost lulling, the foreground creeps, tics and buzzes with all manner of relentless digital edit trickery, seemingly threatening to explode into a breakcore storm at any given moment. While the level of sound design prowess going on here is extremely impressive, some listeners may find that Kunzite occasionally veers towards being slightly cold and unapproachable at points, a factor that’s partly down to the comparative lack of stylistic variation between the twelve tracks here. |
| “Extended Spotlight – New Zealand” – Extended Playlist 070909 – www.2ser.com 107.3FM Posted: 08 Sep 2009 05:33 PM PDT This week, to celebrate the release of the Dirt Beneath The Daydream compilation cover mount CD that came with a recent Wire Magazine, we shine the spotlight on some long white sounds from all black land. The collection was put together by the fine folk at the Audio Foundation which (coordinated by the lovely Zoe Drayton aka ~not aka Swung) supports, promotes and preserves innovative audio culture in NZ. Also represented is the always solid Round Trip Mars label run by Stinky Jim since 1999 and home to SJD and the Sideways comps. Hawnay Troof – Out Of Teen Revisited Animal Collective – Daily Routine Björk – Innocence DuOuD – Racailles Stina – Cantaba Beaumont Hannant – Autun Can – Deadlock Icarus – Sake Inquiet – Middle Of The World High Places – A Field Guide ***Extended Spotlight*** James Duncan – A Till Z Kraus – Let Me Eat Cake Jefferson belt – The Tunnel ~Not – k/not (Chimp Techno Remix) *** Animal Collective – Peacebone (Pantha du prince Remix) Daedelus – I Car(ry) Us Harmonic 313 – Falling Away (feat. Steve Spacek) The Legendary Pink Dots – Fifteen Flies In The Marmalade Do you like our playlists? |
| Paradigm Shift Radioshow Playlist 7 Sep 09 Posted: 08 Sep 2009 05:28 PM PDT The Paradigm Shift is a weekly Monday night radio show presented by Sub Bass Snarl on Sydney radio station 2SER fm 107.3MHz – check the 2SER website for the improved live web stream! It airs Monday nights at the time of 7.30pm for 90 minutes (Australian Eastern Standard Time – GMT+10). Get in touch to send us your music (320s welcome!) – EMAIL: paradigmshift [AT] 2ser [dot] com Meili – Hometime [New Weird Australia, Volume Two] ( www.newweirdaustralia.com ) * [* = Australian track] |
| Wach – Firedance On A Dead Man’s Grave (Beverina & War) Posted: 08 Sep 2009 05:21 PM PDT
Austrian dark ambient duo Wach (aka Reverend Kim and Herr Insomnia) first emerged onto the European dark electronic music scene in 2007 with their debut album The End Of All Dreams on Klangfeld Seuchentrieb, a release that was ultra-limited to an absurdly tiny run of just 30 copies, each hand-wax sealed into a leather pouch. While the duo have both been active with a slew of other musical projects in the meantime, this second album Firedance On A Dead Man’s Grave on Beverina & War should hopefully see their music reach a few more listeners, with the run being extended to 300 CD copies this time (the first 100 packaged in a handsome DVD case). As for the seven tracks gathered here, the sonic content is primarily composed around eerie dronescapes, subtle digital processing and distant treated samples, the entire aesthetic calling to mind the vast yawning void of space, or perhaps a post-apocalyptic desert landscape as sandstorms tear their way inexorably through. Opener ‘Kyrill II’ calls to mind the sort of atmospheres Ridley Scott might use to soundtrack his latest Alien sequel as the crew slowly rouse from hypersleep and distant treated horn elements murmur against what sounds like the relentless rush of pressurised air and the monotonous background hum of machinery. ‘Frenzy’ ups the intensity a few notches against doomy two-note synth patterns that almost call to mind Goblin, shortly before the entire track descends into growling detuned noise as grinding background mechanical sounds compete for space with the synths as they breakdown into tortured tones. ‘Flammenmanifest’, meanwhile, represents the real epic offering here, coming in at 22 minutes and sees the debut working with a broad canvas that stretches from the opening distant burble of rattling motor-like textures into majestic brass, before venturing on further into unsettling ambience and more shearing noise-based textures before its end. It’s also accompanied here with its own enhanced CD video section. While ‘Firedance…’ perhaps doesn’t exactly show Wach pushing the established dark ambient genre template to its very limits, it still shows the duo applying lessons learned from the likes of Lustmord and Muslimgauze to strong effect. Chris Downton |
| Wisp – The Shimmering Hour (Rephlex/Inertia) Posted: 08 Sep 2009 05:23 PM PDT
When you first look at the packaging and track listing for the Wisp’s Shimmering Hour, you might expect it to contain medieval, fantasy themed, Joanna Newsom-esque freak-folk. But think again when you notice the Rephlex logo on the back cover. Wisp is Reid Dunn of New York and this is his first full-length release on Rephlex, following a string of releases on various netlabels since 2003. Dunn doesn’t hide his influences; Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, and Mike Paradinas are obvious reference points, but add Tomita, Vangelis, and Tangerine Dream to the mix and you get a sense of the scope of Wisp’s vision. With a strong emphasis on melody and movement, the tracks collected on this album take on an optimistic, hopeful, almost epic quality you don’t often find in IDM (or braindance to use the term preferred by the Rephlex stable). ‘Teddy Oggie’ opens the album with Aphex-esque wobbly chords and squelches underpinned by a 150bpm programmed break. Freeform melodies weave around the beat delivering us to ‘Picatrix’ which, with it’s four on the floor beat and uplifting yet wistful chord progression, wouldn’t have sounded out of place played at sunrise at a warehouse party in the mid-nineties. It’s not until the fourth track, ‘Flat Rock’, that the pace drops a little, with its melancholy chords and a swung UK-garage-meets-post-rock vibe. Other highlights include the energetic ‘Cultus Klatawas’ and ‘World Rim Walker’ and the epic ‘Summoner’s Shadow’. While there are hints at the medieval fantasy theme throughout, it’s only really overt on ‘The Shaper’, where it’s not hard to picture the odd morris dancer waving a hanky about. Overall this is a fun album. It has a sense of adventure, optimism and forward momentum that will keep you listening to the climactic closer, ‘Winter of Flight’: like the soundtrack to some long forgotten sci-fi fantasy featuring robotic knights who like to dance. Ben Askins |
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