Tentacle Loot #29 | mimoid: mmxx

It’s been a bit quiet here for some time. So why not tune back in a quite loud manner 😉

For some time now I’ve gained a little more trust in Soundcloud. It remains to be seen whether this will last in the long term and whether Soundcloud will manage to decide at some point whether they want to milk either fans or musicians. But at least the algorithms are still refreshingly blunt.

And it was through them that I came across Mimoid. A Toronto based producer about whom you can guess more than you can find out from his previous output. But one thing can be attested without a doubt: an excessive predilection for acid. And so the usual suspicious number combinations from 303 to 808 gather at a table to document their violent disputes on tape. Which… sure…isn’t a whole new concept by itself, but Mimoid manages to stretch his acid with a good number of his own ingredients. If you listen to Mimoid’s second work DSTD, you might get the impression that someone is striving for some good manners here on mmxx. Largely DJ-friendly tempos and selected ingredients. Something that usually doesn’t always work out well, because a child who tries to play by the rules of adults doesn’t really play in the end. But Mimoid is no ordinary child. He suffers from a severe form of serious brain dancer. His uncanny energy builds up through the constant urge to break out of the usual patterns. The individual elements of each track, from the acid lines, machine rhythms and rave stabs, keep pounding against the limits of the traditional set of rules in order to defy themselves and to let off some steam.

mmxx reveals its strengths in two main challenges. On the one hand, in how he manages to weld his repertoire of tracks together and pastes them properly with grease and dirt. And then there is the groove, which doesn’t just make everything a little more funky or wonky or whatever, but rather ensures that our usual suspicious combination of numbers don’t persist in self-disputes, but rather attack each other properly. The acid lines seem to break apart again and again between stoic and stumbling, only to be whipped back into the pattern by a clap or something at the same time. And in the end there is always only one direction: forward!

Buy Music Club #2 | “Beam me back, Stevie!” A very subjective trip into Warp Records back catalogue.

As someone old enough to remember the days before the digital music democratization but just a tiny bit too young to have experienced the magic of the Berlin post-wall-techno-revolution, for quite some time there have only be two important music labels for electronics: Ninja Tune and Warp. As much as we might moan about drowning into a state of invisibility with our own music, simply from the pure amount of supply out there, it’s always helpful to take a step back and remember how different the musical landscape of experimental music was 25+ Years ago. It almost seemed as if the top distributors of “intelligent dance music” would have passed artists and releases to each other, depending on the bpm mood of their average listener.  Everything on the 90bpm landmark for the dope heads came from Ninja Tunes, at 120bpm Warp Records stepped in for the more conscious braindancer and when computer science was as far as making breakcore possible, the gap was open for Planet-µ. (This, of course is less science and more of a blurred polaroid of the 90’s.) Of course there where other labels, but our world was still so small and therefor these ones became the cornerstones that thrived the music of tomorrow.

So why care about this now, at this very moment? Well, there are two reasons: One, Warp Records finally warped their entire back catalogue onto Bandcamp, what gives me the possibility to make a BMC-List. And second, they just used some of their powers to drag you away from Bandcamp back to their very own platform veteran Bleep.com with a Boxing Day Sale. 50% of on their digital catalogue is just a great chance to fill some gaps in your Warp Collection. Which is exactly what I just did. (You might have maybe missed that deal when you read this, because this whole article took longer than I expected). I’m also guessing, I’m not the only one spending a lot of time in dim light behind concrete walls, right now. With not much else left than traveling in memories of brighter days.

And so, like many others before me, I grab the opportunity to share my perspective on this milestone of electronic music history. Deliberately not as some Top-10 kinda list, as I know there is an army of hardcore AFX/BOC/AE fans out there who wouldn’t share my views (…and shouldn’t have to). Instead I rather take on a totally subjective position and take a look back on some albums that actually had an profound impact on me at well remembered moments in time. And maybe one or two of them are part of a collective subconscious, who knows?!

Autechre - Amber

Back in my teenage years there still was a very strong urge going on to decide which sonic subculture you wanted to belong to. And while I was still soaking up all these diverse influences of a blues playing father, my punkrock brothers and my hip hop homies it took some persuasion to get me into this cold, technical stuff called IDM. Weed definitely helped.  And so I remember this moment like not many other stoned situations: Sitting on the backseat of a friends car late at night and perceiving Autechres Teartear for the very first time on full blast. This piece of music was the most terrifying blank peace of paper ever to encounter. Cold, mechanical, full of everything that stroke against my naive believe of “true music” but still a catalyst of strong emotions I had not experienced from music before.

This was not only my starting point into experimental electronic music, but also the moment I realized that there is a kind of music that isn’t more, but just very different from all that music that makes us feel understood, belonging or emotionally confirmed. A kind of music that pushes us into the unknown infinite spaces of our subconsciousness. Often visualized with images from space, but actually digging for unknown places right inside us. And that’s still – also in the process of making music myself – the decisive force in electronic music. It’s not purely a direct channel of emotional expression, which is enjoyed and shared with others. But more of an opened dialogue between you and the pure sonic possibilities of machines (good ol’ “men vs. machine” cliche).

Boards of Canada - Twoism

While I was still busy figuring out all of these Autechrian fractal sonic landscapes, Boards Of Canada where a little bit more kind. Instead of diving into sound in their most abstract shapes, BOC provided us with associations. Their music was quite literally boiling over from them. Experiencing their music was like finding an old box of Polaroids in the cellar. Warm and earthy, like walking over the dry gravel of a country road and smelling the musty pond nearby. But this approach alone wasn’t totally new. There was something else to it. I guess, besides the total mystery of how exactly they managed to uplift these sonic landscapes, there were always some kind of hidden messages. As there are in memories too. The things we banish from our past to make room for everything we joyfully look back to. Something I just recently understood in it’s full potential with the help of a wonderful little DIY BOC documentary by the name This Is Hexagon Sun. But while this one decodes a lot of the hidden messages in BOC’s music there’s also the purely emotional level. And this is where Twoism stands out from their other releases (at least from my very subjective perception). Twoism skillfully combines the naturalistic soundscapes that made them famous (Sixtyniner), with sadly optimistic elevator music for office buildings (Iced Cooly) into a frightening mechanic force of nature (Basefree). A force they later went back to on their last Album Tomorrow’s Harvest, which still scares me so much that I’m not able to make it past the first one or two tracks.

Plaid - Double Figure

When I had my first introduction into the world of Plaid with their Double Figure album I was totally puzzled. There were so many things going on I learned to despise in my naive belive in musical taste, and yet I’ve instantly became hooked by these playful melodies and glitchy sounds. It was a courage for melody that soon should spread all over the place with artist like Kettel, Proem or Ochre jump on the train. But Plaid pefected this sound with Double Figure very early on. They were telling stories instead of handing over big chunks of cotton candy and the complex sound design still had a tiny bit of a raw charm. Like a beautiful rainbow, this whole spectrum of sound was never ment to last. It was just there and you never knew how much of it would outlast the signs of time. But Double Figure certainly did.

I still remember that Plaid were performing live quite regulary in the early 2000’s. It was just on of these acts you would always stumble into and I also remember one of my early gigs on the second floor at Maria am Ufer (R.I.P.) where Plaid was playing the Main Floor. It was funny because they would always come with some big sound concepts, like playing Dolby Sourround sets, just to fail on the technical possibilities on site. At the end they were just playing their tunes, one after the other, in stereo. So for me, personally, their legacy still is the creation of the perfect electronic home listening music. Because the sad truth is, once you reach perfection in electronic music, everything to come is just sound design.

Aphex Twin - Drukqs

Whenever musical genres like Glam Rock, Big Beat or Minimal Techno vanished and got replaced by something new, in retrospect it always seems like there was one defined moment in time to declare the death of a genre. If we would have had this moment in Intelligent Dance Music it would have been Drukqs. It was the perfect IDM album even though at a first glance it was quite complicated to understand it as an album at all. The odd contrast of pseudo accoustic instrumentals and hyper complex breakcore masterpieces just didn’t seem to belong together at first. But in effect you would just listen to it again and again, because both sides where just too beautiful on their own to be put aside, and before you could figure it all out you inevitably felt in love with it and it became the one IDM album we could all agree on. In this sense it was also one of the last great albums of the CD era, I guess. The last time we performed the great braindance unitedly, everyone in his own brain but interconnected trough the shabby connections of a 56k Modem. The death of IDM, only that we just kept going afterwards, everyone in his own niche of breakcore, acid and whatnot.

Tentacle Loot #28 | ZeckDBH – Complete “Drift”

It’s a well-known mess. Hundreds of hours of session material from several years that want to be sift trough, cut, processed and packed in sensible packages to manifest a small chapter of infinity in the infinite expanse of the Internet. Vodor L Zeck and Die Blutige Hand completed at least one of these chapters now by completing their Drifts series with tape No. 18.

Drifts is braindance music for the subconscious, elevator music composed under the influence of acid. The widely distributed yet balanced ingredients of acid, braindance shuffle, leftfield techno and microtonal soundscapes never aim to offer hits and hooks in their seemingly endless jams. Rather, they are signposts for expanded states of consciousness. Perhaps similar to meditation records from the New Age era. Get them all, toss one into your tape deck at regular ritual intervals, roll up some good ingredients and just drift.

Tentacle Loot #27 | Kapha Selections: Sun Castle / Ke’So [KS04]

At first glance, nothing seems to fit on this 2 track split-tape. A solo piano piece on the A-Side and a 15 minute lofi house jam on the B-Side. And yet it apparently reflects the experimental musical melting pot of this New York collective. I say “apparently” because I couldn’t really find out that much about Kapha Selections, except that they have been releasing split tapes for about a year, which largely reflect the underground culture of their hometown.

A little more obvious is the International Winners Collective, to which this tape is dedicated. They’ve been organizing events and parties in Brooklyn, New York and releasing stuff on Bandcamp for a number of years now. Constantly strolling between art gallery and club without seeming to give a damn about whether they should please one or the other target audience. With a cross-eyed look across the Atlantic, such a concept, of course, brings up prejudices about would-be high culture immediately, which are also shaped by experiences from my own hometown Berlin. However, these can be completely dispelled with the two tracks on this EP alone. Because two things come to the fore here: curiosity and honesty. As different as these two pieces may appear, they are both a sincere invitation to a physical, spiritual experience. Both pieces do not want to be viewed and evaluated from the outside, but rather be experienced. (Sorry that I’m doing exactly the opposite of that at this point 😉 )

For these reasons, however, I will simply save myself from describing or even explaining the two tracks in detail. Instead I close with the realization that this short tape is a wonderful reminder that music is a living part of our confused cities and communities and that we will not be able to transport these experiences into virtual spaces.
And that’s a good thing!

Hold on!

Tentacle Loot #26 | JHM – Exhaustive Portal EP

Whenever peripheral areas in music are explored, whether in terms of speed, complexity or aggressiveness, there is always a critical point. Regardless of whether we are irradiated at a gabba party and crave for a climax that we have long since passed, or if we boastfully exchange our favorite breakcore tracks until the complex rhythm structures hit us as a wave of snare drums. At a certain point we cross the threshold from art to sport. And while some feel right at home in this spot, I personally often balance on that very partition, driven by a mixture of curiosity and skepticism. My own approach to music is just far too emotional and physical to be charmed only by my left brain hemisphere. And so, after this highly subjective process of elimination, in the end there aren’t that many who still manage to convey a physical or emotional message under the flag of hardcore-whatever.

JHM (aka Jens Masimov) is probably a little too smart for that.

In his self-description he describes himself as a multimedia artist working with ritualistic distortion, and his musical mainspring could hardly be better described. Located in a gloomy no-man’s-land somewhere between driving techno and gabba, he doesn’t seem to care too much about whether he could under-challenge some and overwhelm others. Instead, he fearlessly dives into the very core of the ecstatic ritual of contemporary club culture. With stoically hammering, distorted kick drums and tirelessly circulating sequences, he keeps us in a sustained state of physical exhaustion at just around 150bpm, which can ultimately only be maintained by fading out all conscious thought processes. Masimov’s talent finally reveals itself in his ability to maintain this state. And although you intuitively feel overwhelmed at first, he still allows room for improvement and allows the individual elements of his music air to breathe. And so ultimately he leaves us with the last remaining conscious decision, whether we want to swim or run.

A Blog is not a Blog is not a Blog: Three human resources to identify high quality music

  • Beitrags-Kategorie:Music Culture

Probably every person who manages to cross the magical Cobain-Morrison-line of 27 years will experience one or the other profound global change in the course of his life, either due to historical or to technological progress. The changes in the music journalistic landscape and thus the way in which we discover and perceive music is probably one of the profound changes in my (average) existence.

While we used to sit in front of the TV until late at night to catch some of the more remote formats on MTv, while we recorded local radio stations, being grateful that John Peel was even broadcasted as far as Berlin and while we followed in the semi-mainstream music magazines looking for creative misfits, we now live in times of limitless diversity. And while print magazines are still looking for new horizons, the classic blog is almost dying out again. Replaced, it seems, with algorithms and influencer playlists on Spotify. And yet besides the little big players of online magazines (Fact, XL8R, etc.) there are still plenty of smaller formats. Well-arranged, cozy places where it’s only about one thing: staying true to the music. You just have to find them!

At this point I would like to remedy the situation a little and showcase my three favorite (kinda-)blogs and at the same time present three quite different formats and approaches.

Read on...

Sunken Treasures #2 | Alex Cima – Cosmic Connection

Alex Cima‘s debut album from 1979 stands in line with a long series of space-disco records from this time that completely dispensed with the classic band concept and produced sophisticated studio albums with lots and lots of synth in it. And with a little dedication to this very niche, you will be caressed by well-known stylistic devices at first listen already. Lots of analog keys, embedded in classic synth-strings, funky stumbling drums that were probably still triggered by hand. And in the best moments, lush vocoders that convey the message of a bright future.

And yet Cuban born Cima has found his very own place in the vicinity of space: planet earth. Because as much as his pieces make use of the tools of his time, he remains pretty close to earth. He tells the story of a brighter future on our home planet much more than of the uncertainty of infinite vastness. It gets cheesy at times, but somehow never boring or arbitrary, because Cosmic Connection always comes around the corner with some clever twists, has its very own groove and proves again and again that he’s not a lazy copycat, but rather someone diligently paving his way trough sonic space.

Luke Vibert was fondly reminded of Can in his homage to Cima, I’m somehow often reminded of Edward Upton‘s (DMX Krew) funky numbers on his own Fresh Up Records.

Tentacle Loot #25 | Fuewa – Complete Earthworks

Fuewa‘s second-born Complete Earthworks already celebrated its fifth birthday recently. And, given today’s musical attention span, it should probably be in a sub-category of unheard classics. But as much as releases suffer from those brief attention peaks nowadays, I also have the feeling that the ephemeral trends of these days no longer really disappear from the scene, but rather retreat to niches where they are still celebrated and loved. And therefore are worth being mentioned even if they weren’t exactly fresh from the eaves.

In addition, Fuewa has put together a completely timeless album with his still most recent work, which despite all this has received far too little attention. At least if you believe the numbers on Bandcamp, Spotify and elsewhere. And that regardless of the fact, that Fuewa‘s label of choice, Sonic Router, did took the right turn at a time when the word Future Garage was already part of our collective memory and went on towards something … well … I guess more post-future. Once again they deconstructed the well-worn legacy of Dub- and 2-Step, Garage and IDM and explored alternative timelines with great tape releases by Broshuda and Fuewa. But while Broshuda dismantled his drum patterns until he produced more or less ambient from beats, Fuewa‘s strength lies in the discipline of not achieving musical renewal through limitless complexity. As much as his pieces are influenced by the pioneers of Dub, Jungle and IDM, he retains very driving and repetitive structures and thus leans on a sound that at the same time was mainly shaped and released on Livity Sound (above all Kowton‘s Utility), who married UK garage and driving techno in equal measure. And yet one can clearly hear that Fuewa doesn’t only have a club surrounding as the cathedral of its sound in the back of its head, but also us aging home listeners. Therefore he weaves timeless melodies into his earthy sound textures, lets ambient pieces flow in and takes us on a journey across a planet that seemed so familiar to us.

For me personally, Complete Earthworks – along with the already mentioned Utility by Kowton – is one of the most elaborate albums of this very special straightforward form of UK Garage and should therefore be brought to the mind especially of those who haven’t sorted it into their memories yet. Especially since we are slowly but surely facing a wildly gesticulating drum & bass revival.

Tentacle Loot #24 | Titch Thomas

“[…] music for humans and others with formidable frontal cortexes.”

Noviellion (Discogs User)

The Titch Thomas Tape Trax had a constant spot on my hard drive for quite some time, a recurring companion for stimulating my frontal cortex, until the latter finally formulated a comparatively simple thought: Where that comes from, there must be more!

Lo and behold, at Titch’s Bandcamp a Pandorian can is just waiting to be opened with a handful of old IDM spells to be brought to life. If you look over the quickly put together album covers, you come across well-known ingredients from Acid, IDM and Braindance hold together by a very special cement called Talent. Unforgettable melodies twist out of the creaky goo. The rhythm section always acts on the verge of physical feasibility and these acid sequences work hard on prophecies of an approaching Apocalypse.

It’s been a bit quiet since his split EP on the beloved Mindcolormusic label, but his Facebook profile gives some hope for continuation. Until then, I would advise you to throw a few voluntary coins into his Bandcan: Perhaps just one or the other battered 303 has to be replaced to make him continue his journey 😉

Tentacle Loot #23 | Wagawaga – OuterYerO’er

Wagawaga has been a silent companion in my musical metacosmos since the very early days. With his first releases on Acroplane – where I also had my first flying lessons – he absorbed the quintessence of dubstep very early, freed from its bursting clichés and reassembled from a fund of unbridled creativity.

While early albums like JinJaNoonBus still shot from all directions with genre references from Dubstep, Breakcore and Acid, his wobbly sound now seem to spring from a center point. That’s neither good nor bad, because Wagawaga has always been somehow … eh ….. Waga Waga … has always been fun, but it offers a different approach to his world. You may stumble and dissolve, change your physical composition, threaten to give up your body in a literal jungle of bass and swelling drums but finally are caught again with a swing. He utters you the desire to use awareness and control as a crutch and fulfills the unspoken desire to be reborn as a rubber ball. Musically, he puts the complete dubstep manual aside and relies entirely on a breathing carpet of bass and natural field recordings. On this he lets his stumbling jazzy drum patterns swell up and down, weaves in sound effects and mantra-like melodies.
What a wonderful late summer!

Inhalts-Ende

That's the bottom of the sky.

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