Overall, a midnight feast of pad wash and beat clunk indulgence with enough wow, flutter and tape hiss to make an old ’80s Dolby-hater happy.
Sand Circles‘ Motor City gets a reissue courtesy of Posh Isolation, the Copenhagen blog-turned-label curated by Christian Stadsgaard and Loke Rahbek (aka Damien Dubrovnik, cf. Lust For Youth). Kudos to LA’s Not Not Fun (cassette, 2012) for first bringing these ’80s new wave/synth-pop pastiches to light, and now PI for giving Stockholm recon-man Martin Herterich‘s project the full wax in all its muddy crackling post-analog splendor. A sliver of airy Kosmische noodle is but a prelude to phasers-on-stun epic slow-stomper, “White Sand,” which hitches knackered bedroom beats to faded kaleidoscopic chords in a BoC-Simple Minds cut’n’shut. There follows a parade of slow-mo midnight pop (cf. Italians Do It Better), druggy disco and Detroit strings washed out over crushed Oberheim arpeggios and Linn Drum thrum: electro beat clatter over synthy wibble (“Motor City”) segues to video-game mood music from a budget boombox (“Downtown Holdup”); early New Order through a rainy windscreen (“Inner City Haze”) cuts to a dusk-bound Gigi Masin OST (“Motor City II”). ‘There are no geographical signifiers to the titles, nor does the sound signal one particular place,’ says the blurb, though in the same breath concedes it ‘points “to Detroit from a distance,” while [presenting] the idea of a metropolis, with all the nauseating ecstasy and sweet desperation that such a place holds.’ Overall, a midnight feast of pad wash and beat clunk indulgence with enough wow, flutter and tape hiss to make an old ’80s Dolby-hater happy.
PI summons sundry spirit kin of the post-industrial ambient-noise Scandi-underground for remix EP, Motor City Remixes. Its four touch-ups are led by Northern Electronics boss, Abdulla Rashim, whose rework of the title track eschews his default 4/4 techno for billowing beatless mesmerism. Simon Formann (half of Age Coin) aka Yen Towers brings a gravelly booming post-industrial techno take on “Endless Nights.” No sleepers on the B-side, as Frida-Li Lövgren aka Quiltland ramps up the charm of “Motor City” into a caustic slow-trance flight of fancy, while 1991 cranks up the cosmic button to the max in stretching out and dissolving “Innercity Haze.”
Motor City and Motor City Remixes are available on Posh Isolation [PI162|PI161]
