(10.27.06) Jason Kohnen still thinks he can squeeze a few more beats out of the
blasted, broken beatbox that he has been furiously thrashing for the
last few years as Bong-Ra. The resident heavyweight breakcore street
fighter, Kohnen mainlines a few thousand volts, twists the knobs all
the way up, fills the room full of half-naked wannabe starlets and
locks the doors. No one gets out until everyone has danced their way
down to bloody stumps or an hour of insane breakcore action, whichever
comes first. (And frankly, with the remix crew he’s roped in to help
out with Stereohype Heroin Hooker, I’d be putting my money on a
floor filled with crippled dancers.)
Stereohype Heroin Hooker, his latest effort to one-up himself,
offers four fresh Bong-Ra tracks and eight remixes — four from
battered veterans of the break-beat wars; four from fresh meat,
youngsters who think they can mix faster and harder than the vets.
Bong-Ra whiplashes the listeners with “Coke Sniffah” and “Suicide
Speed Machine Girl” (as you can expect with titles like that), engages
in a slow burn with “The Rush (Long Time Coming)” — a low-gear climb
to an amphetamine-fueled beat breakdown — and leaves the building
with “Death To False Metal,” a fast and dirty ode to dark-hop and
sludge metal guitar licks.
The remixers? Well, Duran Duran Duran and Cardopusher tackle “Coke
Sniffah,” turning the relentless breakcore anthem into a science
lesson with a brain-addled mad scientist and a CPU-intensive rack of
virtual beatboxes, and a clattering, jagged version that has been
thrown in a vat with a chipmunk vocalist, a grime MC and one
loose-limbed chanteuse. Cake Builder slaps more layers on “Death To
False Metal,” finding places to graft on goblin voices, pianoforte
melodies and lugubrious sludge tones; while Enduser ditches everything
but the relentless beats and hangs a vaporous tonal melody across
those sharp peaks.
Ace of Breaks and Parasite have the difficult task of out-gunning the
machine gun fury of “Suicide Speed Machine Girl.” Ace of Breaks
sneaks up on us with an extended intro of drones and movie samples
before turning the mad machinery loose on the unsuspecting dance
floor. Playing with drop-outs, tweaked EQ, and whiplash back-masking,
Ace of Breaks sidesteps the whole speed issue and turns “Suicide Speed
Machine Girl” into something more stutter-step, more strobe-lit, more
willing to shake its fist as well as its ass. Parasite, on the other
hand, tries to squeeze a few more effects in the “dead” spaces between
the furious BPMs and has a moderate amount of success.
Dr. Bastardo tackles the gradient of “The Rush (Long Time Coming)” by
throwing in more atmosphere, building a track that brings a little
claustrophobia with its kick (like you’re just not sure what that
smack was cut with, you know? but man, it’s making the edges of things
a little tight). Drop The Lime? He turns the track into something
that you’d find hidden on a B-side of a Depeche Mode single. Swoops
of electronics, dubbed out bass lines and echo-rich woodblock, offer to lay down a bedrock of slickly produced dance-floor mania before he
brings in the beats. But, oh, he teases us with them, dropping
everything in half-time, making us work for each snare kick, each
cymbal lick. The rush — yes, baby — it is a long time coming.
Stereohype Heroin Hooker is out now on Ad Noiseam.
