(03.01.09) Concrete Plastic is a small Brighton-based label set up by one of the founders of Ai Records. It covers a similar ambit of electro, techno, and IDM blends with odd flashes of something more experimental. And out of Brighton – albeit in a distinctly Detroit-designed vehicle – comes local lad, Si Mills, who’s the Rootsix behind the Dragondrop EP and its four tracks of propulsive technoid electronica. It moves from the title track’s bubbly lightweight disco-nodding electro through a more assertive slicked-up and die-cut synthi-funk of “Untittaled” (sic). At the other end there’s the glacial synths of “Trigger Bang Float,” a more mellow less skeletal version of snd’s jerking geometrics, infused with glacial sprays of synth and axis-shifting bass bumps. In between “The Next Nosebleed” jacks up a harder kind of groove with more serious squelch action that nods to acid-techno without actually letting it all the way in. Engaging Critical Rigour Mode, it must be said that there’s little to lift Rootsix above the herd of identikit beat’n’squelch merchants; no disrespect, and hardly surprising that most are content to purvey functionally effective genre template fillers when the many are programmed for easy pleasing. Dragondrop is nevertheless the work of a journeyman plying his trade by the genre book, rather than that of one of an intrepid few willing to put aside the book in order to push an envelope or two.
Rootsix also figures on DFPRMX, a rather more varied and questing set of remixes of tracks from Concrete Plastic’s first full-length, Yard’s Deciduous Flood Plains. Yard man Chris H. Jones re-wraps his own “Pacquet,” while seven other tracks get re-examined by usual IDM suspects like Anders Ilar, Arctic Hospital, and Fisk Industries. A further late drop-in from experimental ambient soundscapists, Celer, is the biggest surprise. DFPRMX is largely about slick MenschMaschine music for cyberpunks to robo-frug to, the whole nine Yards being recast mostly in more literal-mindedly floor-friendly fashion. So, you get Arctic Hospital trailing his trademark synthi-cotton candy paws all over the four-square house of “Cascade,” and Karri O making “Whitefrog” jump around a bit, interpolating its dub-tinted techno undercarriage with an orchestra of bubbles and chimes. Then “Portabello” made up with luminous electro-goth glitter and shadow by cosm(et)icist Anders Ilar, flexing and echo-plexing over deliberate 808-style beats. And Let’s Go Outside choose churning tech-y darkness on “Under The Bonnet,” all bass-heavy and bpm-boosted with a buzzing back chatter of malevolent machinery. Fisk Industries deviates to take “Canopy” along a path less trodden – slow’n’low hiphop undertow, creepshow colours, tabla-tronic traces, and a hint of bad attitude before Yard pops in to remind us of the 4-on-the-floor imperative; Eric McIntyre, though, flagrantly flouts it, hiving off the unruly synth-swarms of “Bees” into a controlled stutter and stream over broken beat structures. And finally Celer, the odd couple here, subject “New Beginnings” to the most radical of re-thinks, their beatless barely-there slow-mo drone-flow the antidote to the clubbed-to-death DSP-fest of the rest. Incongruous, but an effective and gratifying minimal ambient comedown to a set that here and there dares, and in doing so wins.
Both released are out now on Concrete Plastic.
