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Something ruptured, something crude.
San Francisco is imploding with a whole new sound. On his third full-length Thumbtack Smoothie’s Homestyle has some in common with Amon Tobin, the rabid percussion is just left of center and the beats are ready to pounce at the quick. “Clyde’s Edge” certainly opens the package with an imploding whiff of absinthe. If you have ever played Pong on acid, this may be the sordid soundtrack. Something of a relentless blur.
The Smoothie takes an amoeba-like sound, something edgy and organic, and struggles with its silly putty edges, stretching it to the brink on tracks like “Dodgeball Mentality” and “Fragmentation Key” (which sounds like a two-parter, separated by a few tracks in between). He takes low-fi rhythms and hyphenates the backend, stunting the beats, roughing it up a bit. Where things take a synchronous turn is on “June Louder” where added is a bit of piano, lain aside a big, bad post-rock wall of percussion. Things become much more interesting a few minutes into the track when a revving of game sounds start up a modulated drag race. Part Bi-God 20, the resemblance to early 90s industrial-goth is fragrant, but not exactly the point.
Homestyle sort of teases you into would be breakout beats, but never quite kicks in, its more experimentation, but repetitive in a flighty way. “Moondoggy” is restless and ultimately flat until its last 90 seconds when it starts to gel, the samba is hinted at and the racy beats collide nicely…but why wait so long when crafting a 5 minute track? The twisting, dialing, adjusting going on through “Sore Eye Soire” is far more interesting, more about frequency than the rest of the recording, with a building percussion, some mysterious key chiming and a munching nervousness. The quirkily titled “Scrunchie Misplacement Incident” is like tugging on a lawnmower awaiting its rotors, the cyclical rip only leading way to a hazy warp of overcast buzz.
Homestyle is out now on Quake Trap Recordings.
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Oh No! It’s Yoko Solo.
On the scene, shaking the foundation, with gadgety, experimental sci-fi techno pop. OK, this is music for a high planet especially on “Coors Party Ball (4am)” where vocoders take over and the energy is zapped into oblivion. On The Forbidden Channel beats are played within harmonies and outside atonalities, merging passages that alert and submerge like a contemporary dose of New York No Wave.
Bay Area’s Quaketrap emerges with this release, “414 years in the making” according to their website! With their use of wobbly voice samples throughout, the spoken work becomes the stream of consciousness rhythm that is robustly playful and quirky rather than slapstick and terse. Though, like any record that strives to fit everything on one record, tracks like “Ghost and West” don’t seem to rise to the occasion and become flat filler. Yoko Solo play with the breathiness of “Tour de France” and infomercialism on the warped “Beer Express, 1651 A.D.” and cheesy proto-goth meets TV themed string arrangements on “Interstate 5 Dead Rodent” with lots of tracks named after various alcohol. No ID will be required to listen to this disc in the dark, however, as it could be referred to as a guilty pleasure. As “Transmission 6, 2000 A.D.” starts we are immersed in a literal garage band live sound that morphs into a blurry white noise pick-up pulled and prodded, add some rambunctious percussion and break out the nachos and wild turkey.
Mind you, these “transmissions” are all pretty sublevel dance music, so you could easily listen from your office chair, especially if it has one of those air pressure up/down controls! Yoko Solo is what you get when you take the wind out of Jack Dangers’ sails, add barley and hops, maybe the edge of Matthew Barney’s sensibility and some tongue-in-cheek. “Glue House Brainrot” is a low-fi growing miasma of bass percussion and assorted finger cymbals. Got it!?
The Forbidden Channel is out now on Quake Trap Recordings.
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