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The M/F Thread 2009: The Quickening

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scarred:
Jesus fuck I leave this thread for one weekend and this is what you leave me. Good thing I'm unemployed so I have time to listen to all this music I don't pay for.

KvP:

Legion of Two - Riffs

--- Quote from: State Magazine (whoever that is) ---Here’s one record you can judge by its cover. The colossal sound on Legion of Two’s debut album Riffs is so ‘industrial’ you can almost trace the cables from those spindly pylons back to the turbine room of some imposing power plant. It sounds like metal, but it’s no head-banging power chord onslaught – rather it sounds like sheet metal being hit, scraped and battered into shape. It’s a cast iron album called Riffs that doesn’t really have any actual riffs, or even guitars or vocals. It’s also smeared in dubstep, glitchy electronica and visceral drone rock, and it might be the heaviest thing you’ll hear this year.

The plant workers are Decal producer Alan O’Boyle and percussionist David Lacey, big players on Dublin’s underground techno and improvised music scenes who fittingly unleashed Legion of Two at the Dublin Electronic Arts Festival last October. Since then, a few snatched MySpace live clips and tantalising song snippets have stirred up an online buzz – and they’ve delivered on the promise with an album that’s as dark and challenging as anything else on Planet Mu.

O’ Boyle’s trademark may be sleek electro and techno, but the shimmering cymbals, hissy feedback and rusty metallic whining on opening track ‘Intro (Starbound)’ is at once a serious departure from Decal’s floor fillers. It’s the pounding live drums and sampled percussion that hammer home Legion of Two’s mission statement though. Riffs is like Future Sound Of London’s Dead Cities after a nuclear holocaust, a rare electronic album with a coherent sonic theme – albeit one of dystopian urban decay.

The six-minute epic ‘And Now We Wait’ takes a corroded cityscape and concocts a wall of noise around rattling shutters, distant alarms, stabby rave motifs and malfunctioning electronics. ‘Palace (Dub)’ sounds like a rewired Blade Runner soundtrack if Vangelis lost the tender to Godflesh or Ministry; its breathy synth pad intro soon smothered in a molten lava bassline, seismic drums and claustrophobic 8-bit sci-fi loops. It also hints at ‘vocals’ buried in the mix, with twisted wailing that’s barely audible through a busted shortwave radio – ghosts in the machine, trapped under fizzling live wires and shards of scrap metal barely soldered together.

But it’s not all gravelly electro basslines and slabs of white noise. Delicate fractal synths act as pinholes of sunlight through acid rain clouds on ‘Legion of Two’, and the xylophone and woodblock effects on ‘Turning Point’ build up to a lush techno finale that Orbital would be proud of.

While the album as a whole is a slow, rumbling beast, the tempo drops even further after ‘(Interlude) ABC’, with its snatches of tinkering keys and a kid’s warped alphabet recital. There’s more space to breathe on Riffs’ cavernous dubbed-out second half. ‘Handling Noise’ is a creaking shipwreck of a track, with echoes of metal barrels slamming against each other in the hold until it descends into a cacophony of drills and squalling woodwind. ‘It Really Does Take Time’ is a dark dub masterpiece, with its panning echo chamber effects, wobbly bassline and sonar bleeps. It also has one of the album’s few ‘riffs’, a slithery low-end synth line that coils around a haunting vocal loop.

With nine tracks spanning an hour (three weigh in over the 10-minute mark), Riffs’ triumph is its relentless sensory overload. It’s not zeroes and ones programmed by algorithms – there’s nothing virtual about Legion of Two’s sound. And as the final track ‘Cast Out Your Demons’ spirals off in a dense fog and wailing sirens, you realise Riffs hits the spot because it’s an electronic album with its live wires and short circuits still showing, a towering noise factory that’ll trap you once you clock in.
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An odd release for Planet Mu. The live drums in particular make it sort of post-rocky at times, but for the most part it resembles some of the more aggressive cuts off of the Nine Inch Nails instrumental album Ghosts, with a harder edge, cross-pollinated with Tobacco here and there. Recommended.



Jesu - Opiate Sun EP

--- Quote from: Pitchfork ---The EP might be the ideal format for Justin Broadrick's music, regardless of his alias. Whether he's trying to erase your head via concrete-slab guitars in Napalm Death, reduce techno to a series of clockwork hammerblows with Final, or massage your pleasure centers with neo-shoegaze in Godflesh, Broadrick's music has a laudable singularity. The three-or-four-song dose mainlines his all-consuming mood of the moment without the potential dilution of trying to fill up a CD.

Broadrick claims to be channeling his long-unused (or presumed non-existent) pop instincts via Jesu, and the band's DNA always has too much of hard rock's cathartic oomph and pop's peaks and valleys to pass for ambient. But Jesu's extended-players like Silver, Lifeline, and now Opiate Sun do seem to bring out Broadrick's more memorable riffs and choruses. If nothing else, they foreground those riffs and ringing climaxes in a way that the hour-plus ebb-and-flow of Jesu or Conqueror isn't designed to do.

Opiate Sun isn't as good as the all-over bodiless sparkle of Lifeline, which may be the best non-collaborative release in Broadrick's unwieldy discography. It's more of a Jesu sampler, a four-song distillation of the band's major modes, with some of Broadrick's most accessible, ingratiating songwriting-- radio-ready if not for the tempos and the fuzz.

"Losing Streak" and the title track are more or less arena alt-rock at a snail's pace, almost cuddly and triumphant enough to be a Foo Fighters single, or maybe Probot if Dave Grohl had drafted Kevin Shields instead of Lemmy. (Plus, I swear, a hint of slow-motion southern rock grandeur in "Losing Streak"'s mid-song solo.) "Deflated" is one of those oxymorons Jesu do so well-- the angelic dirge-- with bass skirting doom metal while the guitar auditions for some early-1990s Creation Records A&R dude. "Morning Light" really is doom, the only out-and-out metal tune here, skewed only by Broadrick's multi-tracked sad-dude vox. Add it all up and (more or less) you've got Jesu.

So Opiate Sun is both the most recent fix for Jesu addicts anxiously awaiting album número tres, and an easy-access jump-on point for not-quite-yet-fans. Opiate Sun's heavy enough to act as gateway drug for those who still know Broadrick only as the guy behind Godflesh's decade-long bad day (if such creatures even exist). It will please the post-'gaze guitar-texture freaks who cream on contact with sonorous feedback. And it's memorable enough to hook those one-and-done consumers of the album-abjuring age. Not bad for four songs.

— Jess Harvell, October 30, 2009
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Terror Danjah - Gremlinz (Instrumentals 2003-2009)

--- Quote from: bassmusicblog ---I’ll be honest - coming from the north west of England, grime totally passed me by; apart from the occasional transmission which broke through via the mainstream (Dizzee Rascal ‘I Luv You’, for example), it didn’t really penetrate deepest darkest east Lancashire. On this flimsy basis, I had the music neatly pigeonholed as a basic, functional sound – constructed in a Bow council flat using Music 2000 for the Playstation, for the sole purpose of being MCed over by a shouty youth in a baseball cap. Luckily, this compilation has come along to prove me utterly stupid and wrong. Granted, there are tracks on here (‘Frontline’, ‘Stiff’, ‘Crowbar 2’ amongst others) that do fulfil that role, but they do so with no little amount of style; blending high energy (not hi–nrg, that’s something quite, quite different) electronic drums and some tricky edits with utterly concussive levels of bass pressure, leaving plenty of space for MCs to do their thing.

 

However, it’s when Mr Danjah (possibly Terry to his friends) ushers the MCs to one side and lets the music do the talking that things step up a notch or three. I was surprised to note just how much you can hear the influence of some of the tracks here on the music that is slaying underground clubland in 2009; compare, for example, the laser-guided synth riffing of ‘Hyperphonix’ with the Brackles release on Applepips ‘Get A Job’, or the slinky alien P-funk of ‘Zumpi Hunter’ with the Purple Wow crew’s output. I think ‘Zumpi Hunter’ is my favourite track on the CD - I pretty much guarantee that you will have that synth hook stuck in your head for weeks after hearing it. Also worth a mention is ‘Green Street’ which splices an almost funky-esque drum workout with glistening melodic flourishes and big bad bass, whilst ‘Planet Shock’ is a cheeky remoulding of the bodypopping 80s electro classic that would appear to be a stone cold club rocker.

 
Although it could probably have done with leaving out a few of the more functional tracks, the compilation offers a fascinating and comprehensive snapshot of a producer that is not well known and a musical style that is oft ignored. I’d say that those who might have previously written grime off – like me - but are into Joker, Brackles or indeed any of the new wave of synth freaks
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5 Years of Hyperdub

--- Quote from: Pitchfork ---Beatportal.com user Yield Load thinks "dubstep is wicked music, but I didn't know how your suppose to dance to it." The grammar's not there, but the idea is: Dubstep-- the nocturnal, claustrophobic subgenera of British electronic music that emerged from garage and 2-step-- is descended from dance music but doesn't sound like it's made for dancing. The tempos feel slow, the mood is usually threatening, lonely, or both. If there's any movement I can imagine going comfortably with dubstep, it's what Three 6 Mafia's DJ Paul rapped about on "Side 2 Side", and the standard step at indie-rock shows worldwide: "I'm in the club posted up, got my arms folded... twistin' my body from side to side."

Of all the videos of dubstep dancing I clicked through online, two stick out in my mind. One is by an overweight teenager in what is likely his parents' living room, a decorative ship's lifesaver on the wall between what appear to be illustrations of the seaside, a large desktop computer at one end of the room, an open door leading to a yard on the other. A track by the producer Skream comes on, and he starts to move his fists up and down like a child banging steadily on a table, taking very deliberate steps across a carpet. That's it. The other is of two men, one black and one white, dressed in suits, dancing in some kind of white, computer-generated void, as the names of their dance steps flash across the bottom of the screen. My favorite is called "Lost in the woods (with bewildered stare)". I don't know if the comedy was intentional. Either way, it's a sign that dubstep has reached a particular position of cultural importance: hundreds of thousands of people are watching a suburban kid dance to it on YouTube.

Hyperdub is usually cited as dubstep's most prominent and progressive label, but it's hard to even call most of their releases dubstep, strictly speaking. They've released off-centered hip-hop (Flying Lotus), brooding chill-out music that recasts the chill-out room as a bunker (Kode9 & the Spaceape), and misfit rave music (Zomby). Hyperdub's sound isn't dubstep, it's urban noir in the 21st century, or at least how the 21st century looked in 1970s science fiction: A procession of florescent signs over an empty street. 5: Five Years of Hyperdub-- their first CD compilation-- has the tall task of trying to anthologize the label without making it seem like they've run out of ideas. Their solution is sensible: One disc of new material; one disc of classics.

Like any label compilation, 5 functions as a kind of mission statement: Here's what we've done; here's what we do. Most of the music on it sounds made for the head, not the feet. In a way, it's like a modern analog to Warp's 1992 compilation, Artificial Intelligence, whose sleeve was a picture of an empty armchair in a living room-- electronic music that has a place in the home.

Describing his music to The Guardian in 2007, the producer Burial said, "I want it to be like a little sanctuary. It's like that 24-hour stand selling tea on a rainy night, glowing in the dark." His two albums, Burial and Untrue, have more in common with Massive Attack and ambient music than anything you'd hear at a club. Zomby, on the other hand-- whose Where Were U in 92? sounded like jungle and drum'n'bass chewed up by a Game Boy-- described his daily routine to XLR8R magazine as "lots of rolling joints" and "eating some chicken-based dish à la carte." These guys aren't public faces, they're lost in the crowd-- they're people spacing out in their living rooms, alone. Burial's identity was secret for two years after he started putting out records. Zomby will be photographed only while wearing a mask.

Anyone familiar with Hyperdub-- or dubstep in general-- will know most of the classics disc. That's the point. One of the label's first singles-- Kode9 & the Spaceape's bloodless cover of the Specials' "Ghost Town"-- doesn't even have a beat behind it; it floats. Burial shows up twice, once with "South London Boroughs", once with "Distant Lights". There's Zomby's nightmarish "Spliff Dub (Rustie Remix)", whose sampled vocalist sings, "One spliff a day keep the evil away," over a track of 8-bit garbage and what sounds like synthesizers in a deep fryer. (The music captures weed's paranoia more than its elation-- I mean, is it supposed to make me like pot or fear it?)

The word "classics" has a kind of accelerated, lax definition in dance music, and some of the tracks on the second disc are from as recent as earlier this year. The heaviest is Joker's "Digidesign", a spacious, bone-simple piece of 80s-style R&B based around a handful of acidic countermelodies, so elegant it almost plays like a jingle.

The first disc-- the new one-- is good, but doesn't hold up to the classics. Those expected to bring it, as it were-- Burial, Zomby, Joker, Flying Lotus-- do, just not in any revelatory ways. Of the bunch, Zomby is probably the most satisfying because he's so hard to pin down: "Tarantula" doesn't sound exactly like anything he's released before, and his most recent single, "Digital Flora"/"Digital Fauna" doesn't sound like "Tarantula". I was never sold on Quarta 330's chiptune routine, nor on Kode9's music either-- their new contributions roll off. The only track that actively perplexes me is Black Chow's "Purple Smoke", whose junkshop hip-hop beats are the most brainlessly retro flourish on the whole compilation, and whose come-hither Japanese vocalist confuses sexy with corny. Minor complaints. Hyperdub deserves this: They've reshaped the little world they work in, and they've reached out to a wider one-- whether that world dances or not.
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Good stuff here even if you don't actually like dub music -- Hyperdub's about as close as you come to the real thing in the dubstep scene these days.

KvP:

Vitalic - Flashmob

--- Quote from: Allmusic ---It took Vitalic's Pascal Arbez-Nicolas over four years to follow up OK Cowboy, but then he's never been a particularly speedy producer. After all, his debut album featured singles that were nearly a half-decade old by the time they appeared on the full-length. Even if Flashmob's title feels a little dated, suggesting mid-2000s trends a few years after they peaked, the same can't be said about its music. While the electro foundations of his sound remain the same after more than a decade, these tracks are sleek and innovative -- proving that Vitalic spent the years between OK Cowboy and this album uniting everything he learned making groundbreaking singles like "Poney" with what's been going on since his last album. While there are more than a few cuts that are classic Vitalic, all masses of synths and hard-edged beats (see the sunny expanses of "See the Sea " and the interstellar closer, "Station Mir 2099"), he's not afraid to change things up, most strikingly on Flashmob's singles. The title track is particularly bonkers, using vocals and synths that get higher and swifter until they blur into streaks, giving the impression of going faster and faster even though the actual beat stays rock-solid. It may be as (aptly) flashy and immediate as, say, Justice, but it also has an artfulness that is all Vitalic. He also uses disco's influence in similarly unexpected ways, permeating the album with the style's spirit rather than rehashing its clichés. "Terminateur Benelux" piles on the handclaps, cowbells, and breakdowns, but balances them with a wittily sinister bassline that borrows from Belgian rave; "Your Disco Song"'s whip-cracking beat and 8-bit synths sparkle and crunch like a shattered mirrorball. "Poison Lips" is even more unusual, transforming Vitalic's vocal program Brigitte into a breathy, glitchy Donna Summer replicant surrounded by swirling pads. He explores Flashmob's surprisingly delicate side more deeply on "Still"'s icy, Moroder-esque atmosphere and fluttering vocalizations, and on the gorgeous "Second Lives," which boasts a melody so lovely it feels like a classical piece given a radical spin on the dancefloor. Even with tracks like "Chicken Lady," which is equally kinetic and goofy, Flashmob is some of Vitalic's most artful, even subtle work. It may or may not be as profoundly influential as OK Cowboy, but it's just as engaging and even more cohesive.
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StaedlerMars:
Yes.

Edit: No! extraction failed!

JD:
Funny, it extracted fine for me. Mostly anyway

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