*This is also posted on my personal blog, which is pretty quiet lately due to school obligations.*
I listen to music constantly, and I’m constantly acquiring new things. So much, in fact, that serious evaluation on an album-by-album basis is impossible. To ensure my musical hoarding doesn’t amount to too much waste, I’ve elected to begin picking out choice tracks from my catch and reviewing them, here. I’m hoping to make this a weekly thing, every Saturday night, mods willin’.
*** I had to take a week off for school stuff (which is also the culprit behind the dearth of proper album reviews around my blog for the last month or so) but I’m back. This week, acid technopop from EOD, a Daedelus remix from UK House guy Floating Points, and acoustic folk from RM Hubbert. ***
EOD – questionmark 2 (from Questionmarks, self-released via Bandcamp)
Perhaps due to his high profile in the 90’s, or the vacuum left by his long, languid release schedule, a lot of people have taken cracks at cribbing the Aphex Twin’s myriad styles. Most of these artists tend to go straight for an AFX-style hard acid sound centered almost entirely around Roland TB-303 arpeggios, and while that’s all well and good, oftentimes the music feels more like faithful genre exercise than anything else. I would be a lot less enthused with Rephlex-style IDM were it not for EOD, a Norwegian producer who captures the uniquely skewed electropop sensibility that Richard D. James brought to IDM as very few do. Following the pretty amazing Ultrecht EP for the acid-centric 03030 imprint, he has released a new EP on short notice to raise funds to repair his Roland TR-909 drum machine, which suffered damage from a power surge.
Ultrecht was pretty evenly divided between airier Selected Ambient Works Vol. I compositions and analog acid techno, but Questionmarks is pretty much entirely in the latter mode, sounding throughout like two or three Analord singles that were never released. “questionmark 2” is akin to some of the outliers in that massive 42-track series, a rushing 4/4 acid-electro instrumental that never really flags in pace. The multiple synth melodies, which by this point are a sort of EOD signature as much as an IDM touchstone, surge and twist in emotive and spectacular ways, and the rubbery 303 bass arpeggios, which admittedly aren’t as acrobatic as they are in some of EOD’s other efforts, provide a more dynamic rhythmic underpinning to the track than the fairly standard 4/4 drum pattern (which still pulls off a satisfying break every once in awhile, and manages to get more interesting towards the end of the track). The only real downside is that it ends out of nowhere, but in a song with this sort of momentum, satisfactory stopping points are hard to come by.
Stream “questionmark 2” on Soundcloud.
EOD – questionmark 2 by Dicccccccce
(“Questionmarks” is a digital only album sold through EOD’s Bandcamp page.)
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Daedelus – Tailor-Made [Floating Points Remix] (from Tailor-Made Remixes on Ninja Tune)
Daedelus has been credited with sowing the seeds of the current Low End Theory-centric “Beat” scene in Los Angeles (notable home to Flying Lotus, among many many others), releasing music since 2001 and cultivating an air of eccentricity in concert (mainly due to his Victorian gentleman dress and fairly spectacular use of a Monome) that hasn’t always paid off on his recordings, primarily due to the fact that he’s so prolific, and thus often inconsistent. Thankfully, the first single off of his new album for Ninja Tune is one of his best in awhile, staking out territory between Bonobo and Joy Orbison with a sultry female vocal (courtesy of Milosh) over a track that quietly builds forwards and up before ratcheting back down again.
For the prospective single / remix EP, Daedelus (Ninja Tune?) picked out a pretty strong pair of artists to retool the track, but the strongest of the two (to my mind at least) is Floating Points, who’s quietly built up a reputation in certain circles over the last few years as a UK House wunderkind. More recently he’s been exploring more jazz-influenced sounds (primarily though his live ensemble, also on Ninja Tune) and his edit for Daedelus follows in this vein. Floating Points takes a bit of a risk in essentially removing the track’s forward momentum, but he compensates by leaning a lot harder on Milosh’s vocal and teasing out its latent lounge potential through tasteful use of a Rhodes (always a good choice) before inserting softly squeezed organ synths and a shuffling rhythm that I would call “dubstep” if the term wasn’t so meaningless these days. Overall, FP pretty much steals the song from Daedelus (it’s more of a deconstruction than a remix) but in so doing he makes a better case for himself as a certain sort of jazz composer than he did with his ensemble group. It’s sort of a shame that Daedelus is probably best known at this point for being Flylo’s LA-based mentor and Floating Points is now known as the guy who talked over the radio debut of the recent Four Tet / Burial / Thom Yorke collab, but if this song (and its remix) are any indication, they certainly have the chops to gain greater recognition for their own work.
Daedelus – “Tailor-Made (Floating Points Remix)” on youtube.
(You can purchase the digital version of the “Tailor-Made” Remix EP, also including a Tokimonsta remix, over at Bleep)
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RM Hubbert – Hey There Mr. Bone (from First & Last on Chemikal Underground Records)
There was a time, not too long ago, when I considered myself an electronica partisan. Tired of the skepticism of people I knew over electronic music in general, I started to articulate a distinctly anti-rockist stance, arguing against the musical primacy of the album format and, more importantly, the emotional primacy of the guitar as a musical instrument. Mostly, this was in reaction to the continued vexation of Radiohead fans who felt as though everything the band made post-OK Computer was “not real music”, and the rise of Chillwave and Witch Hosue, which I considered (and still consider) to be illegitimate, historically ignorant sham genres (I was great fun in conversation, as you can probably imagine).
Over the past year, however, as my music-buying habit has expanded and I noticed that I’m not as drawn to UK Bass music as I used to be, I’ve begun to revisit guitar music. I still find myself largely bored by most permutations of rock and blues (exceptions being shoegaze and certain types of metal) but through my recent induction to the Swans fan cult I’ve delved into the Young God Records back catalog and discovered that I have a greater affinity for folk music (the darker and drone-ier the better) than I thought I did. This impulse took me from Gary Higgins to Angels of Light to James Blackshaw to Mountains and finally to the wider world of fringe folk, at least, that which I can find through Boomkat (always the closest resource at hand for a musically cloistered soul such as myself). A few weeks ago I was sifting through their new releases and came upon a Scottish guitarist named RM Hubbert and his First & Last album, which I had never heard of, but when I played the sound clips I knew I had to have.
Hubbert’s music plays sort of like a less studio-bound James Blackshaw, which is to say this is unaccompanied acoustic virtuosity par excellence. This particular track (the first on the album, dedicated to Hubbert’s dog) is marked by its distinctive use of on-instrument percussion, which meshes seamlessly with Hubbert’s flamenco-indebted playing, which slides and flares with natural finesse. On record I figured must have been multitracked or performed by someone else, but live footage seems to indicate this is all Hubbert, which is certainly impressive. My vocabulary for this sort of music is lacking (well, more lacking than usual) so as with any music I’m naturally intoxicated by, I can only really speak of the feelings it elicits. I could probably break out any number of hoary scenarios such music would be perfect for (bike ride through an orchard with your sweetheart in the Summer, I’d say) but suffice to say this is the sort of music that a particularly lucky person might walk in on at a cafe somewhere – unpretentious, supremely competent, and personal.
RM Hubbert – “Hey There Mr. Bone” live. The actual song starts up around 1:05.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbUnb20mBdg
(Boomkat has “First & Last” region-locked outside of the US [props to Rob for the assist there] but it looks like the digital version, as well as other formats, may be available direct from the label)
