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TOKYO MASK :: Backbone EP (CD)
Tokyo Mask is the first out of the gates for Greece-based label, Low
Impedance, and Backbone hurtles onto the scene with a
spine-rattling impact. Backbone will shatter yours, frankly, if
your low-end can handle it; but it will crush you slowly. Guttural
beats growl while sludge-laden vocal effects struggle to break free of
the mire. Echoes of Scorn, Mothboy and Godflesh even surge through
Tokyo Mask, but there’s both more and less here: more static, less
movement.
“Valveworm” growls and leers, hulking in the shadows and floating on a
bed of compressed air. Beats lumber with room-staggering intensity
and tiny birds — flush like stars — squirt past, micro-notes cast off
as electricity from the lurching monolith. “Slowly Backward” warps in
reverse, back-masking and inverted loops lend menace to theatrical
washes of phantom chorals. Like Scorn turned inside out, “Slowly
Backwards” seems like it is leaving the room instead of entering and,
yet, I’m not feeling any more secure in the fact the monster is
retreating versus approaching. I don’t know where it is going, nor
does its locomotion make sense to me. And, as Tokyo Mask, flirts with
dreadful silences, the atmosphere is more oppressive and creepy.
“Suspicous” moans with whale song, processed wails of cetacean fury
that peak and fade like the passage of a tsunami wave. “Semantic
Spook” chews through ten minutes of tape, coruscating like a fusion
between Pelican and Scorn — sludge beats dragging down doom-tuned
guitars into a tar pit of endless echoes. Backbone feels like
lead weights sunk into your intestines. Excellent.
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PRIDON :: New Steine EP (CD)
As flirtatiously light as Backbone was dark, Pridon’s New
Steine is filled with frisky analog synthesis, loopy programming
unrestrained by gravity. Pridon makes me feel like I could strap my
speakers to my feet and still manage to get off the ground.
“Caretta” is moody analog melodies alongside coughing electronics and
laid-back drum programming. Sweet and tart like a glass of lemonade.
But with floating bits of pulp that give it texture on the way down.
“Relax” chatters and swings with a fanciful wiggle. The drum kit,
chattering with the brushed enthusiasm of a tightly wound jazz
drummer, licks and kicks behind the melodies, offering a vibrant
rhythm upon which everyone gets a ride. (While Peekay Tayloh’s remix
offers the same sort of jangling journey, but only backwards as tones
and melodies are skewed by back-masking and echo effects.) “Scruffy”
sings the body electric while drum machines tick-tock to the systolic.
Furthering Pridon’s love for sumptuous analog tones, “Scruffy” is
only off-kilter because of its predilection for IDM rhythms, staggered
beats which cavort to a generative pulse.
A departure from the dancing organics of other tracks, “Legh Naoun”
lives for less than two minutes and barely gets a chance to delve into
its deep basso rumble. It dies a premature death — a too-brief life
of whispering punctuation and dark echoes. Maybe this is what happens
to songbirds when they are caged: restrained too long, their songs
become dirges. A fair warning, perhaps, or a melancholic reminder at
the end of a half hour of chirpy goodness.
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KAMOTEK :: Loftway (CD)
John Dousk has a sense of humor about his work. Kamotek’s
Loftway is a record well at home in the digitized 21st century,
filled with squirts of 8-bit noise, vocal chirps and Speak ‘n’ Spell
dictation, overly complicated drum programming and the winsome
melodies that all bedroom programmers seem to be able to eke out of
their analog machinery. But what keeps a smile on my face as I listen
to the record is the tiny inflections and gilding that Dousk layers on
the work.
A breathless soprano, digitally cut into a quavering echo, dances with
chipmunk singers against a groaning drum ‘n’ bass beat in “Locksmith
Blockade” while “Midnight AfroBeaver” whistles with 8-bit
cheerfulness, singing a delirious song of pixilated mushroom munching
and dinosaur jumping. “Darlimond” is filled with analog tones that
rise like smoke signals while a computerized voice intones number
sequences over a tight bit of drum programming. It’s like a modern
day Numbers Station transmission where the background is a squiggle of
digitized music that also hides a numerical pattern (obtuse to all but
the most plugged-in data-head). “Feeble” is anything but; it’s a wash
of static-edged sound, swirling synths, and spastic drums — the sort
of texturized confusion that dances on the edge of chaos.
“Velocymbal” reminds me of Amon Tobin’s Out From Out Where; it
swarms with lovely tones while big drums punctuate the percussion and
a sliced vocal track hiccups like a funk singer hopped up on a
sparkling water. A grizzled bluesman is sampled for the analog
pastorale “Generation Egg,” a syrupy tune of synthesizer tremolos and
airy whooshes. The vocal sample chirrups like a fat robin on a branch
outside the studio window. “Multi-Jazz” is the sort of scatter-phonic
“free” jazz that only Squarepusher and the like can imagine — piano,
drum kit, singer caught mid-scat, percussion and double bass are
sampled, reversed, looped and dubbed into a schizophrenic rendition of
a lounge act standard. “Crescendo Sheep,” sounding like a grittier
Arovane, wraps warped beats around a vaporous PA recording and a few
melancholic strings.
Loftway is a record which grows richer the further you delve
into it. While the opening tracks seem content to squirt water like
playful dolphins at the marina, the later tracks are more like a
deeper trip into the belly of the aquarium where you can get lost in
the dazzling display of color and light from the undersea exhibits.
Dousk has a well-developed sense of self-referential satire about his
work that can sometimes obscure the emotional texture of his work. Or
maybe he’s just being coy. Either way, there is depth here worth
diving for. Very nice.
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All releases above are out now on Low Impedance Recordings.
