Originally written by Chris Power · 7 December 2009
This week, the third edition in Armchair Dancefloor’s mix series comes from Glasgow-based producer and DJ Sei A, who’s plotted a superb course through the off-kilter funk-step and cyber-soul of Mount Kimbie and Jamie Liddell to jack-house, tech-house and not-house (aka the Beatles). The mix also features exclusive track ‘Lazers’, taken from Sei A’s forthcoming album on Turbo.
Cio D’Or – Die Faser 1/Die Faser 2 (Prologue)
Alongside her album of the same name, Germany’s Cio D’or serves up a double dose of some of its best tracks in both original and remixed form. Inhabiting the more melodic currents of what has emerged over the course of the past year as ‘headfuck techno’ (deep, hypnotising and often subversively heavy), on ‘Goldbrokat’ D’or conjures her most haunting tune yet. A highlight of the ambient mix Donato Dozzy recorded for mnml ssgs – which has done much to champion (as well as christen, I believe) the headfuck scene – back in October, the tune appears here in three compelling variants (well, four if you count ‘Zellulose Wind (intro)’, which you probably should because it’s a variant of the same tune).
The original mix is a smooth roller, music-box tones and delicate tremors of piano hanging above a straightforward drum pattern that’s roughened up with echo-laden surface noise and a muffling, forceful bass. Donato Dozzy’s ‘Ambient RMX Version 2!’ is lushly textured in the style of Global Communications, the melody stretched out and borne aloft above crashing waves, slanting strings and banks of warm ascending pads. After the infinite peace of that comes his ‘Techno RMX’, which is distinguished by a looseness at the core of the groove generated by the wild phasing of the loping 303 bassline, the track’s slapping beat, and a more blatantly acidic tweak that wanders back and forth across both of them (listen).
On the second disc, ‘Pailletten’ still seems to carry an echo of ‘Goldbrokat’s melody, but here the production is more austere, chill winds blowing across greyscale creaks and crackles. The Sleeparchive remix injects a stream of bleeps into the track’s heart that warms things up a little, but it’s on the flip, with ‘Seide (Tränensalz)’, that D’or’s emotions really step to the fore, cello and glockenspiel-like tones alternately seething and trembling in a memorable union that’s all the more powerful for its shakiness (listen). Provided this incipient genre's trancier elements don't lead it towards the indulgences of progressive house, we can expect a lot more good music from this section of the techno spectrum next year.
Alog v Astral Social Club (FatCat)
Call me a hidebound old conservative but I often wish FatCat had never signed a straight-up guitar band. Not that there’s anything wrong with the guitar bands they sign; they’re pretty damn good. But for those who knew the label in its first incarnation as an impeccable techno record shop in London’s Covent Garden, then saw it grow as a real force in avant-garde electronic music (and issuer of some proper bangers, as is only right), a slight sense of regret is inescapable. Fortunately, however far the apple’s fallen from the tree we still have the Split Series, and its 20th release proves that it’s preserving its buy-on-sight reputation. Norway’s Alog provide a compelling take on electronic songwriting with ‘Every Word Was Once an Animal’, its viciously treated, screwed, chopped and churned vocal spurting out above a hypnotically rising and falling bassline that finally grinds to a halt eight minutes into the track’s 13, the extended outro comprising guitar shredding and yet more motherboard-enhanced vocal gymnastics. It’s like Animal Collective after they’ve hoovered up all the brown acid at Woodstock and washed it down with some Jonestown Kool-Aid.
Notable Scottish post-punk Neil Campbell’s work as Astral Social Club has chaos at its heart, as evidenced by the amorphous mutant gabble of ‘Clarion Super-Cortex’. It’s punishing, but balm is at hand in the form of ‘Vurt Chorale #1’s pastoral wonk. A strummed and plucked detuned guitar trembles underneath circular trills and eddies of found-sound, the track finally building into a busy, bracing drone before ‘Corby Kiss’ comes along and, in fine avant-garde style, well and truly pisses on your aural chips (listen).
Scuba – Negative/Speak & Aesaunic EP (Naked Lunch/Hot Flush)
‘Negative’, on Ireland’s Naked Lunch, is one of Scuba’s best productions to date: a sturdy, poised piece of oil-wet technofied dubstep. Viciously dubbed-out and sustained stabs thump into place around a whip-smart 2-step drum pattern and a simple harmonium-like synth-line. The tune’s plummeting swirl has an effect that’s both instantaneous and naggingly moreish, deepening into more than the sum of its parts over its five-and-a-half minutes. Over on the other side ‘Speak’ utilises similar tools but adds a chopped and breathy diva vocal and a more scraping, fidgety rhythm. By the time the off-kilter chiming melody kicks in halfway through you’ll either be sweating it up in a very dark room, or very much wanting to be doing so. Serious night music (listen).
The title track from the ‘Aesaunic EP’ doesn’t waste time debating the techno/dubstep crossover, but instead just flips between a 2-step and 4/4 beat pattern, which lends it the effect of sounding like its constantly being mixed into by another track. The real reason this EP’s here, though, are its closing two tracks. ‘Golden’ is a sweet bumping ride on a cool blue train, hitting the same vein of jazz-inflected drum & bass that DJ Krust spent so much time mining, while ‘Symbosis’ ventures a tentative low-end melody and crawling rhythm before a stuttering vocal lifts the track high into the sublime (listen).
The Beautiful Schizophonic – Erotikon (Crónica)
Perhaps it’s the time of year or my inescapable decrepitude, but the armchair seems to be my destination more often than the dancefloor right now. Maybe it’s just that a lot of superb ambient/drone/slippercore music’s being released at the moment: Black To Comm (see AD015), cacao (see below), Rameses III (see below); I could go on (see below). Pushing its way towards the front of that estimable bunch is The Beautiful Schizophonic, aka Jorge Mantas, whose Erotikon doesn’t waste time in enfolding you in piling waves of rich, subtly melodic texture. ‘Aysha’ and ‘Bambilány’ show just what you can do within the drone framework, brief dabs of birdsong or hushed vocals imparting a panoramic sense of wonder.
Even when Mantas pursues more chilling moods, as with the hollowed-out tonalities of ‘Nocturnosque’, an innate musicality is still clearly apparent in its swaying distortions. The magnificent ‘Alba’ stitches a sample of Au Clair de la Lune from 1860, the earliest known recording of a human voice, into the haunting piano playing of Yui Onodera. ‘Fornarina, with its puffs of glowing notes rising up around an LA phone conversation, is a warmer adjunct to Robin Rimbaud’s work as Scanner, while the 14-minute wash of closing track ‘Pollen’ hits pretty much every pleasure centre that ambient music can reach (listen).
Simon Scott – Navigare (Miasmah)
Given that he used to be the drummer in Slowdive, whose Souvlaki LP stands out as a classic of the shoegaze era, Simon Scott should know a thing or two about guitar textures. And so it proves on Navigare, which rounds off a very good year for Erik Skodvin’s Miasmah imprint. Mournful tones run along the length of ‘Under Crumbling Skies’, the title of which is amply suggested by its rumbles and structural groans. Much of this album’s appeal lies in its shifts between pummelling noisescapes such as ‘Flood Inn’ and the lingering beauty of more reflective pieces like ‘The Old Jug and Drum’, where a tub-thumping beat is buried beneath layers of slowly unwinding melody and surface interference. Best of all are the cavernous depths and seething climax of ‘Ashma’, which contrives an impressive union of beauty and power (listen).
Redshape – The Dance Paradox (Delsin)
Techno producer in anonymity-preserving mask-wearing shocker! OK, so Redshape’s secret identity might not be the most original ploy in the book, but that he’s doing it for the right reasons –to put the music centre-stage – doesn’t seem to be in doubt. And what music! The Dance Paradox, his debut album following three years of 12” releases on Music Man, Styrax Leaves and his own label Present, is a work of highly impressive consistency that trips through the last 20 years of techno without ever sounding self-consciously or uninventively retro. It’s the Detroit-leaning melodic complexity of this collection that impresses most, Redshape’s analogue synths coating powerful opening trio ‘Seduce Me’, the superbly sleazy ‘Garage GT’ and ‘Bound (Part 1 & 2)’ with a deeply affecting mournfulness. Elsewhere ‘Globe’ and ‘Dead Space Mix (Edit)’ subvert the air of sorrow into a more menacing and barely enforced restraint, both tracks prowling their confines with tension-inducing restlessness (listen).
Dinky – Anemik (Wagon Repair)
The fourth album for Berlin-based Chilean Dinky (Alejandra Iglesias) is home listening techno in the best sense of the term. The teeming bleep melody and jacking house vocal samples of ‘Childish’, for example, somehow conspire to relax rather than energise, just as ‘Ceramik’s cicada-like woodblock beat and rising vocal hums impart a feeling of bliss that makes you sink back rather than get up. The reason for this is less to do with the befuddling weed-like effect that some densely programmed electronic music can have, and more about wanting to unpick the intricate layers Dinky has used to construct these varied, strange and oddly personal tracks. ‘Skyped’, for instance, has more going on in it than it probably has any right to, the surging celestial melody that floods through it becoming more keenly awaited with each repetition.
There might actually be a bit too much going on in the case of ‘Fadik’, Dinky’s version of Mazzy Star’s ‘Fade Into You’, on which it sounds like an over-caffeinated percussionist has been turned loose in Tom Waits’s Bone Machine-era beat laboratory, but that aside this is an involving, richly intelligent album that gives you more the more time you give it (listen).
Untold – Gonna Work Out Fine (Hemlock)
Is there a dryer sound in dubstep/future garage/something-else-probably-by-the-time-this-gets-posted than the one Untold is pushing? ‘Gonna Work Out Fine’, a high-tensile blend of flickering hi-hat, bass punches and augmented hand-clap intrusions, presses up so close to the speaker it’s tempting to think if you whipped your cones off you see it there; whatever ‘it’ might actually look like. It’s a sound calculated to devastate on big rigs, of course, which is why it might sound ever so slightly odd coming out of your home system (and absolutely pointless out of a phone on the bus I’m afraid, rudeboys), but there’s a compellingly ultra-synthetic quality to sounds like the frantic rave stabs of ‘No One Likes a Smart Arse’.
Throughout, there’s little you can do but stand back and admire the sense of invention at play here. I have no idea if ‘Palamino’s a misspelling or just some new, technofied word, but in musical terms it’s a revelation, flipping between rave-style bubbling synths, warped bell-like clusters of notes, a twanging double-bass bassline, analogue phone tones, fraught percussion and a sweetly cyclical vocal sample. Nodding at house, rave, garage, techno and drum & bass, this is the sound of a unique producer widening the gap between himself and the rest of the pack. Again (listen).
cacao – Permutopia (stdio)
Recorded in Hackney between April and July this year, cacao’s Permutopia is, in short, a stunningly beautiful piece of work. Moving from a cicada-threaded calm through looped guitar strumming and the muffled undersea glimmer of ‘For Civilia’, the album builds towards a powerful climax with its closing three tracks. ‘Anarres’ whips up a snowstorm of reversed sound, voices stuttering through the mix to add further disorientation before stretching out into beautiful abstraction. ‘Circum Europa’ flips the standard drone approach, beginning as a solid, steady bar of crackling noise that slowly devolves into a tinny swirl. ‘Palanese’ is a master class in fashioning celestial ambience from unlikely building blocks, its wavering vocal sample and vinyl run-out groove bump buried deep at the heat of towering shards of synth texture (listen).
Rameses III – I Could Not Love You More (Type)
‘Rameses III was the second Pharaoh of the Twentieth Dynasty, and is considered to be the last great New Kingdom king to wield any substantial authority over Egypt.’ Typical Wikipedia: total bollocks. In fact, Rameses III is a three-piece from Croydon who blend pastoral folk with rich fields of ambient texture. After the initial honeyed gust of ‘We Shall Never Sing of Sorrow’ this album almost becomes prey to its own pleasantness, its middle section drifting past in a gorgeous, head-nodding lilt.
The near-half hour of its closing three tracks, however, banish any thoughts of this album slipping into pretty anonymity. ‘The Kindness in Letting Go’ swells up from a mournful slide guitar motif into a rattling, shaking cage of tremulous notes that loop themselves into an echoing squall, and the title track throws out arcing lines of what, I imagine, tears might sound like if they could vocalise. Don’t think about getting up from the floor anytime soon, though: if ‘All Shall Be Well’s smeared organ chords (like the intro to The Who’s ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ on Mogadon) don’t keep you there then its deep, ponderous bassline and hypnotically manipulated vocal samples will. It’s a magnificent piece of work (listen).
Chris Power is one half of British Males.
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previous editions of Armchair Dancefloor.