Tentacle Loot #21 | Metadata – TRANS EP

Open your ears and tip your toes for this handy 2-Track-Banger from Metadata!

The Argentine label Infinit Records dropped their third EP into the realsm of Bandcamp in notime. And slowly but steady the musical cornerstones that pull the two labelheads Franco ‘D and Cruz Coronado together emerge. Trippy acid jams, analogue breaks and a balanced preference for classic MPC Downbeats without committing to the 90s all too much – at least not in terms of BPM.

Quite the contrary – Metadata’s TRANS EP (a side project by Cruz Coronado and Lan) raises the pace bar siginificantly. Stubbornly impulsive and yet somehow playful, more drum machine than sample chop, the drum carpet whizzes over the almost 10 minutes. The melody part, meanwhile, jumps happily irradiated alongside. Grinning broadly without noticing how the warning tempo limit signs roll by. It all sounds kind of like Plone at a 90s jungle party, but it’s a fun portion of braindance that warms up for the next group activity.

J’s rolled with fingers crossed 😉

Tentacle Loot #18 | The 36 Chambers of Danny Wolfers

 

Usually, if you are a musician with only half as many identities, you can be sure that you have lost any prospect of any kind of musical career. After all, the musical identity of one’s own alter ego is usually the creatorˋs greatest asset. And once a recipe has been found that will keep your place in the queue of abundance free, you have to stay tuned and repeat formula X-Y until you get bored and get back into freelance poverty.

So it seems that the only conceivable way to escape this creative one-way street is to have a musical output that a single imaginary identity simply cannot cope with on its own. Regardless of the question how a real person can handle this

… because Danny can.

Where (contrary to popular preferences) I enjoy to hear musicians like Kid606 or Mark Pritchard keep breaking their blueprints constantly and pushing me into completely new worlds of sound, the wondrous “Aha!” moment with Legowelt always arises when someone from my musical arena comes back to with something like: “Oh … yeah, that’s good shit, right ?! Thatˋs actually a Legowelt Track.”

All the more I blossomed through a random Bandcamp fanmail thing from Danny Wolfers, which (far too late) made me realize that another incredible treasure trove of musical parallel identities lives on his very personal Bandcamp site. And even more, mostly on a pay-as-you-please principle. While I recently bought one of the records listed there for a ridiculously low price on Discogs, I guess I will be busy looking at this level of musical effusion even approximately for quite a while now.

Overall, Danny Wolferˋs Legowelt Bandcamp site is a little bit of a personal cabinet of loving curiosities.

Among countless hand-painted, fluffy album covers that reflect a uniquely sympathetic, deliberately naive DIY ethos, circulating Tape Acid Jams and warm, analogue ambient treasures abound, which alternately plant stories of elephants in city parks, extraterrestrials in fast-food restaurants or retro-futuristic vampire societies in the listener’s imagination. And probably the greatest achievement of Danny Wolfers is that you can believe all of these stories. Because he believes in them himself. Because he chose to believe all of these stories. And so with each release you understand a little more that Danny is a great role model for the eternal child in us. Someone who takes well-groomed naivety and an exorbitant knowledge of kitschy micotrends of underground culture to create his dream worlds uninhibited. Someone who does not criticize or condemn exaggerated musical clichés like coolness, but simply soaks up everything and let his robots translate his own version of it.

Danny Wolfers, the man who makes music faster than others can hear it.

“Word.”

Tentacle Loot #17 | Poisson Chat: Nocturna Træcks I+II

As much as I try to avoid mentioning the C-Word these days, opportunities often do lead to inspiration. And so we start this review with a figuratively clichéd thesis once again:

“Isolation is a warm place.”

Not just since his Nocturna Tracks releases I+II Poisson Chat cultivated a very deep and warm sound. In his minimalistic Deep-House compositions he takes us into the comforting realms of pure emptiness that only someone with a truly introverted mind can empathize.

“What I’m looking for when I’m composing music, is an isolated, quiet, and peaceful environment (like the deepness of the ocean). Going like a fish (-cat) to a new world to express what I feel. With my music, I think people can imagine their own underwater stories, and swim into some nice places.”

This is how the artist himself described his musical world of inspiration in one of his rarely seen web appearences – a DJ-Set Podcast / Interview, which was published for the Italian online magazine Electronique.it in 2014. And these ambitions can still be recognized as a driving force in his releases. In the same interview he also described his efforts to strip down his sound as much as possible in order to archieve a clear idea. And indeed, precisely these ingredients lead him to an amazingly focused sound, well-placed in genre terms such as Minimalism, Deep House or LoFi House, but skilfully eludes the corresponding genre clichés. His driving grooves, warm sound carpets and resting melody sequences, create tracks that work on dreamy, lost dance floor escapades as well as on peacefully exhausted six-hour drives back home from the latest festival weekend (which will definitely come ;).

Those who take the rewarding venture to dive deeper into the Poisson Chat‘s catalog will also discover a handful of downtempo treasures in which he has clear evidence for a fluid connection between the early Lofi masterpieces by Boards Of Canada and contemporary LoFi House Trends. This preference is particularly evident on his Unidata alias (which I almost certainly suspect is his creation too, even if this is not clearly written anywhere).

With a few exceptions from the early days, Poisson Chat consistently published on his own label creations Poisson Chat Musique (PCM) and Wave Memory (VΛV).


 

Tentacle Loot #14 | World Crime League vol 1

“1997, EARTH

CORPORATIONS HAVE BLED THE EARTH DRY, LARGE PORTIONS OF THE WORLD ARE NOW UNINHABITABLE. ICE CAPS MELTED, RADIOACTIVE WASTE PREVALENT. CRIMINAL ORGANISATIONS ARE RAMPANT, CAUSING MISERY FOR THOSE WHO CLING ON TO LIFE IN A TOXIC WORLD. AS OF 1995 THESE CRIMINAL ENTERPRISES BEGAN TO CONSOLIDATE, QUASHING LOW-LEVEL CRIME AGAINST SURVIVORS OF WW3 AND INSTEAD TARGETING THE CONGLOMERATES WHICH LEAD US TO INTO THE DARK TIMES WE NOW INHABIT.”


 

“Wow…that’s rough!” You might say, reading the promotion text from Temporize Records. “I don’t really wanna hang out there! I’d rather stay here and chill.” But I tell you what. As dystopian as it may occur…It’s a quite funky environment. Between all these wrecked cars and robots on deserted sidewalks, there are palm trees blooming. I mean… it’s a bit warm and you have to wear protective suits but it’s better than freezing your ass of in Winter 2020, aint?!

Anyway… World Crime League vol. 1 is all kinds of things but not a dystopically gloomy premonition of an uncertain future. Although … this aesthetic may have sounded different in 1990. As you listen to the tracks, you are joyfully caught up in old memories of Miami Vice episodes and Turrican Amiga Games. World Crime League gambles through all styles of house music, but most of all they make themselves sympathetic as they never go straight four to the floor. Neither are they really tricky or experimental. But somehow … cheeky. And tracks with the tag “cheeky” on it always have a very welcome existence in my collection. Because being cheeky requires courage. You have to get past over-ambitious seriousness, leave genre boundaries behind and prove that you are able to have some serious fun. I obviously did!

Oh, and besides… If you are in Germany and read this text before 1998, with a little luck you might be able to grab a tape copy at your local record dealer … even if they are already sold out at Bandcamp.

Octobird Salad #7 | Pacific Planets

I tend to go off topic. No 2020 dystopian megafuture, no winterly cold digital abysses. Instead: Which instrument would you bring on a desert island? … on a strange planet … to communicate with people there … or at least to just hang out and watch the two moons …

…fairly stoned.

In the variety of experimental house music, a handful of artists have emerged in recent years, who have given a very own coloring to the washed-out concept of world music. Far from squeezing cultural assets of non-Western cultures into banging club tracks, but also from subordinating themselfes musically to the researched cultural heritage in false humility by simply creating a prettied blueprint. Instead they trace back their own club culture as a contemporary kind of rite and ecstasy to the origins of this music, which functions far from egocentricity and self-expression. Be it as a musical concept or just as an ingredient in experimental club music.

Probably the most consistent in this ranks are Don’t DJ (which I unfortunately stupidly DJed twice in this set … sorry; /). With their percussive polyrhythms and impulsive monotonous structures, they build bridges between non-western tribal music and the raw idea of techno. The 12th Isle label preferably uses color palettes and publishes wonderfully quirky tracks, impregnated with pale pastel memories from a imaginary Caribbean vacation in 1974(ish). And then there are formations such as Groupshow (with Jan Jelinek), Tru West or even Transllusion that are deeply influenced solely by their clearly audible improvisational character.

TRACKLIST:

Pacific
Untitled (Blue)
Fly Timoun
Repercussion
Silent Elektro
Speedway
Chilazon 2
Syrian Rue
Pet Hair Magnet
Alternative Currents
Forget About It
Moment 4
Chasing The Loophole In A Relentless Spiral Of Self-indulgence

Octobird Salad #6 | I still don’t know what I did last Summer

Damn, the last winter of the decade! Outside, in front of the clubs, queues doze in puddles and slowly soak themselves up with mud. Inside, as a precaution, the soundtrack of the indivual is bashing down the faces in a minor key in order to push the impending depression back into subconscious. And I’m crouching here in my over-heated flat and still don’t remember what I did last summer.

Time to put my smartphone into the video recorder to recapture.

It was definitely a happy one. Always nice and LoFi, but most companions out there already realized that there’s need for more than a 64bit tape plugin on an 808 beat to make everything 12bit.

World Crime League cruises with us through a wonderfully wonky, housy album thing, cheerfully wagging their feet between throttle and brakes. Sweely and Ex-Terrestrial inject their light-footed acid house with springy breakbeats and rewind our listening habits back into the next subgenre of the 90s. And Marco Bernardi shows that he can do totally, completely different than dystopian and dissonant. Same Ingredients but with loads of sugar. A nice dessert before the next rough meal.

Last but not least, it is still a tongue-in-cheek pleasure to look back on a decade of tape rewinds, in which we’ve been daydreaming all nights in long forgotten associations of a brighter future.
Not to be imagined if, from 2020, completely new genres may pop up again. Then it’s over with cozy!

TRACKLIST

1 Palmbomen II – Pure Tibet [Beats In Space Records]
2 World Crime League – Palm Haze [Temporize Records]
3 Dreems and Jamie Blanco – Percussive Racing Cars [Futureboogie Recordings]
4 Leo Anibaldi – Universal [Safe Trip]
5 Sweely – You Don’t Really Want Me [Lobster Theremin]
6 Marco Bernardi – Space Coral [Futureboogie Recordings]
7 Nackt – Let’s Go Shopping [Left Hand Path]
8 RIP Swirl – Possessed
9 Ex-Terrestrial – Urth Man [Pacific Rhythm]
10 SFV Acid – Trader Joe [SFV Records]
11 Junk Runner – Nanofax [Pr0gramma]
12 Leonardo Martelli – Alice [Antinote Recordings]

Tentacle Loot #11 | The Hatcliffe House Tapes Vol. 7 – Incidental Moments And Accelerated Fusion

… or just one of countless research papers from the John Lee Richardson lab.

When you first land on the Bandcamp site of Indifferent Space Recordings, you feel a bit lost but yet tied up by unknown forces at the same time. What kind of planet is this? A tape label … an acid planet? But then track after track you become aware that you’ve stranded in a peaceful dictatorship, because this planet counts only one inhabitant:
Captain John Lee Richardson.

Richardson recently released the collected works of his two senior alter egos from his self-managed discography: Acrelid – Illegal Rave Tapes and The Hatcliffe House Tapes. While he indulges in a good old sample-loaded Braindance style on his Illegal Rave Tapes, his “House Tapes” are more dedicated to the laid back psychedelic spheres of retrofuturistic electronic music.

On the warm, limited frequency spectrum of a cassette recording, one get carried away into the infinite vastness of space and yet always has the feeling of being in a very personal, comfortably furnished parallel universe. Sometimes stoically impulsive as on old recordings of the Silver Apples, sometimes leaning back and playful as on many Ghost Box releases.

As I said, Vol. 7 – Incidental Moments and Accelerated Fusion is actually just an entry-level terminal if you decide to travel with Richardson. Because once you’ve started, you’re out there for a while. Far out!

Highly recommended are also his early Oscillopeisia releases as well as his YouTube channel, which gives a wonderfully blurry look from his spaceship.

Tentacle Loot #2 | Tape Squize – XOOWO EP

It sounds like Tape Squize had to squeeze his 5 Braindancer Megahits on double tempo onto the Tape because he got a bit tight on Tape length. This guy from Portland, Oregon gets straight to the point. Highspeed Rephlex Drums, melting Acid Lines and washed out Melodies that will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about Love. If you are just tough enough to listen.

The YOOWO EP joins a full handful of releases from msh3005 Records. But this one is by far my favourite from what I’ve heard so far.

Collectors can get the EP in lovely old-fashioned formats. A tape version – which should be sold out by now. And also a CD version in an oldschool Floppy Disc Case.

“Handmade by the artist himself while he was struggling to find impossible (for him) inner peace and get proper amount of sleep.”

This explains a lot.

Inhalts-Ende

That's the bottom of the sky.