Cyclic Defrost Magazine

Alucidnation – Get Lost (one world music)
Pivixki (Sabbatical)
Dokaka – Human Interface (Dual Plover)

Alucidnation – Get Lost (one world music)

Posted: 23 Sep 2009 04:35 PM PDT

Bruce Bickerton loves ambient trance music. To be more precise, he loves that form of melodic, dubbed out, effects heavy dance music that made the Orb such a popular band in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Get Lost is an appropriate name for the album – almost a riff on the Chet Baker documentary Let's Get Lost. However, here it is lost in the music of the near past, beatific crafted versions of memories, audio postcards of times spent and memories revisited as if there is no tomorrow. I’m quite keen on J.S Bach, but the idea of creating music in the form he did is a kind of musical dishonesty that even a person donning the hat of a critic would find repulsive.

Get Lost is full of symbolic meaning – from the band name to the road/path iconography, to uber-cheesy samples like: "the infinite variety forever crossing the threshold". He even dishes up a pop ballad, ‘Anywhere', that has the syrup laid on thick, but acts as a testament to the steadfastness of his love.

It may be that I’m a cynic, as it’s quite evident that Bruce is musically talented. After all he has been let loose on the people at the Big Chill in England on quite a few occasions and the promoter of that festival, Pete Lawrence, must know a thing or three? But it’s not just a case of a few old geezers reliving their youth and serving it up to young revelers is it? Or perhaps you know that crowd x want hot soup so that is what you serve them? Even if it is the same old soup that you served them yesterday, and a few too many spliffs have got in the way of making some new soup.

If you have the urge to listen to dubbed out, high end melodic sounds played very politely, this may be for you. And I must admit having also loved the Orb’s sound in the period this album’s sonic blueprint is pitched at. The point of which is to say – why are you reading the words of a foolish cynic?

Innerversitysound

Alucidnation – Get Lost (one world music) is a post from: Cyclic Defrost Magazine.

Pivixki (Sabbatical)

Posted: 23 Sep 2009 04:20 PM PDT

PIVIXKI feels like an enormous joke has been played upon the listener. There’s something hilarious about this avant garde fusion. Even while you try to stroke your chin you find your fingers raised without your control in that awfully bogan, yet somehow fulfilling metal salute. It’s a furiously frenetic and frequently silly (albeit in a straight-faced earnest manner) collaboration between local pianist/composer Anthony Pateras and Agents of Abhorrence drummer Max Kohane. They sound exactly like the Necks would if they decided to kill their bass player, get tatts and listen to grindcore.

Except maybe the piano, which takes on an abstract, flowery, new music feel, with the exception of when Pateras pounds the bejesus out of it like all he owns are thumbs. At times they get a little earnest, playing with silence and time signatures, letting everything fall away before plinking and plonking nervously along, but the duo are at their best when working together and pounding you with an over the top percussion piano onslaught.

This is a really interesting work. It feels like it breathes some life into experimental music, primarily due to Kohane, his drum sound and his frequent desire to just pound away like he’s hammering away at a nail or (gasp) playing a 4/4 beat. For a change, it’s not about what they’re not doing, it’s actually about what they are playing. Like all Sabbatical releases it’s limited to 200 and is fascinating, frenetic, and really something unique. The duo fuses together effortlessly, constantly moving, not afraid to startle and get a little musical alongside their naughty beds of atonal discordance.

Bob Baker Fish

Pivixki (Sabbatical) is a post from: Cyclic Defrost Magazine.

Dokaka – Human Interface (Dual Plover)

Posted: 23 Sep 2009 04:17 PM PDT

It’s probably around the time of the earnest chugging groove of ‘Sala’ – track 36 on Japanese lunatic Dokaka’s 88 track debut album Human Interface – that the first notion you may be losing touch with reality really begins to take hold.

It’s not necessarily its musicality, or its R&B groove (something it shares with the 1:19 ‘Verb’ four tracks on). It’s more in the way these tracks are surrounded by some of the most curious and schitzo attempts at music that you’ve ever heard. This is sheer lunacy, the kind of crazy obsessive outsider genius that is all too rare. The music is fine: a myriad of genres, quite experimental, carefully structured, short sharp and punchy, with most tracks clocking in at just over a minute.

There’s a cartoony feel to Dokaka’s blend of rock, pop, r&b, torch ballads and bad 80s memories. But that might be because he’s created this whole damn thing with his voice. He’s famous for his vocal only reinterpretations of Led Zeppelin, Slayer, and The Rolling Stones, though Bjork also enlisted his services for her own experiments with vocal music on her 2004 Medúlla album. Human Interface is his debut solo release and, whilst sharing a similar manic weirdness with Mike Patton’s Adult Themes for Voice (Tzadik), he also delves into highly musical areas that are nothing short of jaw dropping.

Perhaps this is the evolution of beatboxing – a one man barbers shop quartet attacked by a rubber lipped banshee. Once you normalise this kind of lunacy you’re in trouble. Has genius ever been this damn weird?

Bob Baker Fish

Dokaka – Human Interface (Dual Plover) is a post from: Cyclic Defrost Magazine.