 1.
Murcof Cosmos
Mexican
composer Fernando Corona (aka Murcof) treats us to a third
album of dense, abstract electronica. Previous releases
have tended to hone in on glitch-based minimalism, but
Cosmos is different – this is a brooding, fiercely
dark soundtrack, highly focused and full of intense emotion.
The album contains six tracks, each approximately 8-12
minutes in length. The cavernous echoes of Cuerpo Celeste
immediately set the tone – as Cosmos thematically
draws on the huge expanse that resides beyond our earthy
solar. If you imagine for one-minute that the earth is
a dot of light indistinguishable from a trillion stars,
moons and planets, then this record will make perfect,
scary sense.
What I like about Murcof is that the project is not adverse
to melody; therefore Cosmos allows itself elbow room to
move beyond the naked suffocation of comparable minimalist
works. The stage is set, then Corona implants atmospheric
stories using cathedral drones, eerie samples, luminous
keyboard tones and shimmering, ghostly orchestral passages.
The deadly hunger of Cosmos 1, stacked with lethal analogue
keyboard burns is awe-inspiring in its sheer power and
intimidating menace – sounding rather like a malevolent
Klaus Schulze - the track slowly unfurls with stunning
ambience. The album’s consistency is startling,
this is Murcof’s masterpiece.
|
 2.
Radical Fashion Odori
You
don’t get many albums like this to the pound, a 30-minute
venture into neo-classical electronica, guided by beautifully melodic
piano, entwined in abstract clicks and cluts. On this evidence,
Hirohito Ihara is right up there with other influential Japanese
composers such as Nobukazu Takemura, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Susumu
Yokota. After
softly playing with a variety of sampled timbres on the short Opening,
Ihara immediately delights with his riveting piano work, playful,
elegant yet foreboding – Suna slows to a halt before entangling
itself in more beautifully-constructed scales, and later heavily
romanticised strings.
Developing
his sound further, throughout the album Ihara introduces pipes and
itchy micro-programming, which sounds like crackling vinyl, it adds
a sense of surreal substance and gives further momentum to his brisk
guiding piano. Neither is Ihara adverse to carving out some uncomfortable
passages of music, Usinibi is particularly atmospheric and disquieting,
as Ihara toys with improvised moods. These few darker tracks splendidly
balance Ihara’s desire to connect with listener on an emotional
level, alternating quickly to entrench the listener in euphoric,
playful melodies – but it’s his marvellous use of piano
that really hits you for six. The stunning Shousetsu is especially
moving, the classical influences are palpable, but the ticking background
clock and use of claustrophobic sampled breathes take this into
a surreal soundtrack world, full of dreamy, nostalgic imagery.
The
light-hearted Shunpoudoh, with its bizarre verbal samples and lightly
stomping song structure demonstrates a willingness to playfully
toggle the emotive dissonance of Ihara’s work, whilst Photo
Dynasmo sounds like a dusted off period piece from the late 1920s,
with crackling backgrounds and sequenced piano riffs, deliberately
broken and re-stitched, spilling keys onto a canvas of bizarre female
vocal spasms – as Hirohito draws you into a fascinating world,
that few artists have the skill or confidence to venture into.
Curiously,
the fact that this album is only half an hour long only makes you
more attentive. What’s for certain is that Odori is a delightfully
romantic album, beautifully realised with profound self-assurance,
a mini-masterpiece if you like - make no mistake this is already
one of the best releases of the year.
|
 3.
Prefuse 73 Preparations
Prolific Hip Hop and IDM guru Guillermo Scott Herren
serves up his fourth Prefuse 73 album in approximately seven years,
a career notwithstanding an additional trio of ambient/jazz records
under his alternative Savath & Savalas moniker.
Herren’s
growing legion of admirers will no doubt be delighted to discover
that Preparations is a natural extension of his acclaimed Surrounded
By Silence release of 2005. Spread over two discs, the first epitomises
Herren’s unique tactic of painstakingly overlaying reams of
Glitch-spattered edited samples, strewn over languid Hip Hop beats.
Slightly
more accessible than previous works, Preparations is strong on the
melodies and features female vocals in segments – a smidgen
of Savath and Savalas ambience doubtless pervades the intricate
yet intelligent production. With virtually the whole album solely
recorded using Herren’s favoured Akai MPC sampler, Preparations
is living proof that racks of hardware and/or reams of software
are not the be-all-and-end-all when it comes to producing contemporary
electronic music.
Meanwhile,
disc two, ‘Ensembles’ – only available on the
physical CD release, consists of modern classical compositions eliciting
Herren’s acoustic talents (cello, flute, clarinet, piano)
– an altogether different beast from an altogether different
composer. Preparations is undoubtedly Herren’s most expressive
and enriching album to date. |
 4.
Scratch Perverts Watch The Ride
For almost a decade, scratch team Tony Vegas,
Prime Cuts and Plus One have been collecting trophies like candy
for their innovative turntable theatrics.
Now, however, their talents are recorded for a new hip hop mix series.
Apart from featuring a handful of their own in-your-face electro
rap tracks, Scratch Perverts happily indulge the likes of Spank
Rock, Roots Manuva, The Chemical Brothers, and even Queens of the
Stone Age to embody their disparate influences.
Watch The Ride is a belting rollercoaster of hip-hop, grime, dubstep
and drum’n’bass, spliced and mangled via contemporary
scratching, programming and some killer breakbeats. At times, this
is on another level. |
 5.
Robert Logan Cognessence
At
the tender age of 19, Robert Logan has already collaborated with
Brian Eno on the music for a feature-length documentary and been
invited to lay down beats for club diva Grace Jones’ new album.
Two projects that would probably psychologically terrify most musicians,
for very different reasons.Cognessence
immediately opens with one of its best tracks, Lost Highway; displaying
a maturity far, far beyond Logan’s years, magnificently intertwining
dark, cavernous atmospheres with portentous programmed beats, enhanced
by demonic female vocal whispers and deranged dubby basslines –
it’s a belting debut. 19 years old? Please. The majority of
artists working in this sound field never reach this plateaux.
Thankfully,
this wonderful beginning does not detract from the rest of the album.
Budapest follows, sounding like a combination of influences but
no-one you can really pin down as trembling bass shatters lucid
hip hop beats and generously conforming melodic pads. Excellent
stuff.
Most
of the tracks on Cognessence flutter between unnerving soundtrack
terrains and a trendy IDM aesthetic. One minute you’re being
hung, drawn and quartered by the ominous weaving strings and concealed
middle-eastern vocal chants of Cloud of the Unknowing, the next
poked and prodded by the IDM playfulness of Error Message, or the
wonderful, Pop, which rivals Warp’s current wave of cross-cultural
electro protagonists, Jimmy Edgar or Jackson And His Computer Band.
The
only discernible influences I can ascertain on this rollercoaster
of dark ambient/post-industrialism are perhaps the moody paranoia
of Massive Attack or the muddy, mashed up rhythms of Amon Tobin,
but Cognessence is so rich and varied in its moods, and so thoughtfully
and expertly textured, that the results pretty much transcend the
requirement for comparisons – the album sits entirely on a
ledge of its own.
I’ve
been listening to electronic music for three decades and I count
on the fingers of one hand the number of artists under 20 years
old who have impressed me so earnestly. If you like your electronica
to be murky, sinister, atmospheric, layered, expansive, unpredictable
and thoughtful, Cognessence is a no-brainer. |
 6.
Robin Guthrie & Harold Budd
After The Night Falls/Before The Day Breaks
Although Harold Budd promised retirement after
his stunning Avalon Sutra album 2½ years ago, we find him
(thankfully) returning to the fold for a collaboration with ex-Cocteau
Twins co-founder/guitarist/producer Robin Guthrie. Maybe Budd only
intended to retire from solo releases, or maybe he'd had a bad day
in the desert. Nevertheless, it’s just good to have a new
CD with Harold Budd printed on the cover.
This
twin-set of albums have been released simultaneously and complement
each other as each track has its own companion piece on the corresponding
disc. For example, track one on After the Night Falls is titled,
How Distant Your Heart, with the opposite track on the second disc
titled, How Close Your Soul. Not really sure why there were not
simply released as a two-disc set, but the decision’s not
worthy of close inspection.
More
pertinently, to the satisfaction of Guthrie and Budd’s many
admirers, these albums are an intruiging and airy union of Guthrie’s
signature guitar sound and Budd’s signature piano sound, fused
together and bathed in cavernous echo and calming synthesiser washes.
Neither Guthrie’s sprinkled guitars nor Budd’s light
fingered piano tones dominate the music – although Budd’s
piano tends to guide the mood, whilst Guthrie’s succulent,
wandering guitar perhaps guides the song arrangement. However, both
are seamlessly integrated, and one therefore gets the immediate
impression that both artists forged a remarkably natural working
relationship during its recording.
For
the most part, the 18 tracks that cover the duration of both CDs
mainly consist of ‘drift music’, swimming effortlessly
at an unswervingly lax tempo, with guitar and piano refrains meditatively
supporting each other, residing on a bed of ambient synthesisers
and very occasional percussion elements. In fact, I was quite surprised
by the closing Turn Off The Sun (from After The Night Falls), which
breaks into gentle, lead drumming with crashing percussion; on this
occasion Guthrie’s guitar does dominate and is stylistically
reminiscent of his Cocteau Twins era.
One
thing’s for sure, the more you play these two albums, the
more the songs come into their own and the further you notice the
subtle, radiant changes of mood and emotion. Absolute masters of
their trade, this collaboration was never going to be a disappointment
and it isn’t, the duo’s alliance sounds exactly as you
might expect, if not better considering Budd & Guthrie’s
equally prominent styles - both After the Night Falls and Before
The Day Breaks are simply beautiful ambient albums that require
oodles of slow absorption to reap the full benefits, after which
they’re in another league.
|
 7.
Seefeel Quique (Redux Edition)
Formed
in London, 1992, Seefeel was originally an experimental music group
with a conventional guitar, drums, bass and vocal line-up. The band
then changed direction at the height of the pop/shoegaze era to
encompass electronics, most successfully envisaged on Quique, initially
released in 1993. Now
re-released, this special redux edition charts the band’s
short-lived evolution from proto-shoegaze merchants to ambient/techno
experimentalists, and although Seefeel moved to Warp records and
released two further albums, the project actually dissembled in
1996, never to reunite.
The
single most astonishing fact about Quique is that the double-album
is 15 years old. Those unaware that this album is a re-issue are
unlikely to notice, so ahead-of-their time were Seefeel at producing
multi-layered ambient atmospheres blended with subtle guitar loops
and sumptuous sinewy bass lines. The only link from their days as
an indie band are Sarah Peacock’s deliberately incomprehensible,
yet seamlessly blended shoegaze-style vocal utterances.
As
many people have come to discover, Quique is not an immediately
attractive collection of songs, the production seem rather plain
and unimaginative at first – especially compared to the enormous
sound evolutions we’re used to these days, and unlike many
other worthy ambient albums, the tracks tend not evolve much within
their own arrangements. However, it’s the steely strength
of Seefeel’s basic ideas that are so powerful, every track
has its own mood and purposeful sense of direction, shivering with
fragility, oozing with melody and pulsing with a worldly technical
intellect that was well beyond much of what the ambient genre had
to say at the time.
This
special edition re-release compromises of two discs, the first housing
the original, digitally remastered album, and on disc two, a collection
of mostly unreleased tracks including rare mixes. That’s more
for the fans though, it’s the original album that’s
really succumbing - the more you play Quique the more you open up
to its warm, chilled, glowing excellence – as listenable and,
incredibly, relevant now as the day it was first released. |
 8.
John Foxx Metamatic (Special Edition)
The unsung hero of eighties synthpop, John Foxx
innovated as a member of pre-Midge Ure Ultravox then largely disappeared
off the radar when he began a solo career. However, any underground
purists who were wise enough to keep their ears to the ground at
the time were well rewarded by Foxx’s 1980 solo debut, Metamatic,
which sounds ever so refreshingly relevant in 2007 – and there’s
not many eighties artists you can say that about.
Metamatic
is probably the first and only example of John Foxx trying to climb
aboard the synthpop money train, driven by Gary Numan’s phenomenal
late-seventies success. Everything from the deadpan vocal delivery,
nonsensically avant-garde lyrics and one-fingered synth salutes
reek of Numan’s 1979 album The Pleasure Principle. Yet, Foxx
in pop mode is still a joy to behold, as he travails through innumerable
classics such as Underpass and No-one Driving, and there are plenty
more succulent album tracks to feast on with a surprisingly modern
production aesthetic too, like Metal Beat and the unique electro-pop
brilliance of A New Kind Of Man.
For
purists there’s also an additional CD, which I must admit
threw up a few questions in my mind - if only because Metamatic
was already re-released with bonus tracks in 2001, so why weren’t
the additional six bonus tracks featured here not added then?
That
aside, disc two brings together various singles, B-sides, mixes
and some previously unreleased Foxx tracks including alternative
versions of He’s A Liquid and an excellent reinterpretation
of A New Kind Of Man – Depeche Mode eat your heart out. Stand-outs
include the instrumental B-side, Film One, the stunningly electric
Burning Car single, the Eno-esque instrumental, Glimmer, and lots
more besides.
Foxx
was never going to be the next Numan, or a huge synth pop star in
any form, however, if all synthpop albums were as intelligent, well-made
and ahead of their time as this then the world of electronic music
would be much richer still. |
 9.
Makossa + Megablast Kanuaka
Anything
that comes from Kruder & Dorfmeister’s G-Stone label usually
carries a certain seal of quality, and it’s really up to Makossa
& Megablast (Sascha Weisz) to keep that flame alive on their
debut album. This
Austrian duo delivers here a 13-track collection of rich, dubby
grooves, propelled by fizzing electro keys, African vocals and percussion.
The recent single, Kunuaka, is a real highlight; beautifully put
together, with dub-inspired, sonically-inducing world grooves and
earthy electro-keys – Subrinah’s deadpan rap sits effortlessly
atop what is a delightful mix.
Tracks
such as Porque, with impassive vocals from Cleydys Villalon, have
an almost nostalgic, old-skool dub feel – there’s no
doubt that Makossa & Megablast are production masters; they
way they merge smoky, spiritual grooves with a contemporary electro
spike is highly impressive – the sound is so clear, with everything
beautifully balanced in the mix. As mentioned earlier, this is what
you almost come to expect from a quality label such as G-Stone.
Elsewhere,
the light, spacey keys of Rip It Up, enhanced by Ras T-Weed’s
luxurious reggae-inspired vocals effortlessly combine the best of
Jamaican dub with the futurism of modern downtempo dub, whilst the
track, Get It On, featuring heady vocals from Kool Keith, is almost
trance-inspired hip hop; think Erik B & Rakim wistfully orbiting
the earth, rapping through a space walk.
Kanuaka
is a remarkably consistent album, wonderfully realised – if
I had one minor gripe it’s that some of the tunes could have
been flavoured a little stronger, but this might have detracted
from analysis of the production, which is an absolute treat. Regardless,
given time, the songs are sure to grow and grow on this top notch
debut.
|
 10.
New Young Pony Club Fantastic Playroom
This English five-piece has only been on the rampage
since 2004, subsequently touring with Lily Allen, Klaxons and musically
consigned to numerous television ads. Their name apparently signifies
a “younger and kinkier” adaptation of the Irish band,
Pony Club – but no-one seems to know much about them.
So
what’s all the fuss about? Well, with this debut album New
Young Pony Club prove to be an almost perfect amalgamation of indie
and electronic pop, but with a gritty disco punk edge. Bursting
with sassiness and brimful of tantalising tunes, Fantastic Playroom
trailblazes through its 10 tracks, enlivened by Tahita Bulmer’s
almost perfunctory, spoken vocal, one-dimensional rock beats, funky
guitars and a contemporary electronic element.
The
band’s effervescent attitude and Bulmer’s double-tracked
vocals are occasionally reminiscent of the B-52s, but Fantastic
Playroom is undoubtedly targeted at today’s ever-expanding
retro crowd. Having already released three memorable singles, Get
Lucky, Ice Cream and The Bomb, all featured here, there are equally
as many catchy numbers ready for your summery consumption.
Perfect
pop, with hardly a bad track to mention, New Young Pony Club’s
spiky songwriting is well-suited to the car, bedroom or dance floor,
and this is perhaps the debut of the year.
|
11.
Luke Vibert - Chicago, Detroit, Redruth
12. Blonde
Redhead - 23
13. Various Artists - 200 (Planet Mu 200th Release)
14. Dr Syntax - Self Taught
15. Von Sudenfed - Tromatic Reflexxions
16. MR 761X - 3 (Minority of 1)
17. Steve Jansen - Slope
18. Swayzak - Some Other Country
19. Well Deep - 10 Years of Big Dada
20. Funkstorung - Appendix
Click here for Albums
of 2006 |
