(02.21.05) Soaring ambient opening notwithstanding, Bidnezz hiccups and stutters like it is the performance art piece for the Dance of the Misfit Toys. With twenty-two tracks that take anywhere from less than thirty seconds to more than five minutes to present their broken toy choreography, Bidnezz hums with the chaotic spasms of fractured hip-hop. Imagine Dr. Dre bringing in Oval to do final tweaking of the latest West Coast blunt tracks.Vibraphone and drum kit perform a loungesque soft shoe in “Wallis & Futuna (remix of Steve & Rob)” while digital processes slice and drop the duet into a hiccuping instrumental. The gentle mood of “Dog Actually (remix of Mic Mell)” is shattered by a rupturing of sonic walls, a breakthrough that allows surges of scrambled vinyl noises to fill the room. The vocal line of “Hollis (remix of Cinelux)” is heavily sliced, the simple lyrics turned into stuttering gasps of broken words. “Disa Bling” hops and churns around a sliver of voice, a cut-up sample that is folded back on itself a few hundred times until it becomes barely recognizable as having been born from an organic source. “$$legs” is an R & B piano melody that is caught in a static snare and, as it struggles to break free, it distorts and breaks up, becoming a fragmentary ghost of its full-bodied self.Some of the interstitial pieces — the short bursts of sound that live and die in less than a minute — are transitional efforts, burps of scattered collages in “Babbling” and “Worldcomin” that erupt like a fast-forward moment on an old tape deck. Others like “Hipsteos” cross your radar like moments of clarity on the radio dial where you interrupt some strange Caribbean transmission already in progress. As individual tracks, they don’t last long enough to sustain any life of their own but, when taken in tandem with their adjacent tracks, these small transitional pieces add to the overall texture of Bidnezz: the strange and fragmentary soundtrack for a kingdom of damaged wind-up toys. Travis Stewart makes songs and then cracks them open, curious as to their internal workings. The resulting pieces are patchwork creations with gaps and holes in the integrity of their melodies, leaving room for the exposed tick-tock of their clockwork mechanisms.
Bidnezz is out now on Merck.
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(02.21.05) Bovine Rearrangement is a remix disc where 19 + 1 remixers come at an Ilkae track with their own spatial vision and knob-twiddling aesthetic. The original track (or maybe it’s an entire record that is being subverted here) isn’t included, allowing us to come at Bovine Rearrangment from a variety of mindsets. You can visit it as a remix disc, or disregard that small detail altogether and simply enjoy it as a smorgasbord of barely linked musical ideas. Me? I’m totally tabula rasa on this one.As you can imagine, there is a wide variety of flavors here. There’s video game music from Vim and Secede (the former goes full-on Mario Bros. soundtrack for their remix, while Secede sucks in noises from old console games and hangs them like Christmas tree ornaments off the melody line); there’s a Jamaican dub and steel drum interpretation from Kettel, a deliciously glitchy variation with long organic tones and whirling passages of reckless stringed instruments by Deadelus and a version by Joseph Nothing that uses water pipes and space noises from lost UFOs.Sprightly hiccuping electro-clash from Setzer keeps the mood light while Tim Koch constructs a version of squelchy analog synthesis, bubbling 8-bit notes, and icy grandeur to give his rearrangement a cinematic scope. Isan’s mix is the crystalline morphine drip for which they are known while o9’s mix is filled with windy echoes and watery reverberations. Label-mate Machine Drum slows everything down to half-speed, idling in the sub-cellar where all the tones are fat and heavy, and MD turns the core melody into a slippery lounge mix, filled with ghostly light and soft-focus tones.Merck went all IDM Pokémon — gotta catch them all! — on Bovine Rearrangement, casting their nets wide for a diverse assortment of remixes. And, as it turns out, the source material was the artist’s choice from one of the forty-five tracks on Ilkae’s debut record, Pistachio Island. It’s a lot of choices that seem to have one thing in common: a beguiling seduction inherent in Ilkae’s source material. When other labels like Schematic, Warp and Rephlex are doing their damnest to mystify their listeners, its nice to see a label release a collection of work that makes your brain smile.
Bovine Rearrangement is out now on Merck.
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(02.21.05) Deru’s latest release for Merck, Trying to Remember, manifests itself in a fog of particles, as a collection of songs that struggle to express themselves through veils of static and hazy sandstorms. The songs are the breakbeat equivalent of isotope decay — charged ions rattling against a Geiger counter with random frequency as if the source of their expression was a wild mélange of radioactive elements, a heavy metal bouillabaisse. Filled with radio static and particles of blown sand, Trying to Remember is an obscurity of memory that suggests melody more than it is actively driven by it.”Spread Your Arms” is overrun with a gentle river of static while a single note melody pines with aching melancholy over a tiny ripple of chattering synthetics. It’s the sound of the high desert sands trying to cover up a rusting piece of machinery that has lost its way. The machine struggles on towards its destination, servo-motors whining with the heat and the grit while internal alarms sound their distress with increasingly fainter calls. “The Reasons,” a thirty-eight second explanation of the record, is nothing more than the processed sound of a windstorm blowing sand through an empty house. The opening of “Tapah” is a walk into the depth of the desert, past the dust devils and shifting dunes (the payoff of “Tapah” is the delicious oasis of rhythm and whispered voices that lives beyond that wall of dirt). “The Days Before Yesterday” is a Mobius strip of decrepit loops, struggling to bring themselves back into a cohesive sonic structure, but too much air has gotten into the works and the edges of the loops fragment and fracture with each iteration. The bell loops of “Only The Circle” close the record with their fading song against a rising hiss of static like sunlight dying across an expanse of wind-burned rock.The delight of Deru’s record is that it takes the crackling focus of Pole’s static and locks it into an echo chamber with delicate bell tone melodies and Merck’s penchant for breakbeat, spinning everything into a slowly evolving windstorm of brushed noise and fragmented downtempo.
Trying to Remember is desert chillout music to follow a wild night of tribal dancing across the hard sand of the arid plateau. The summoned spirits whisper through the night with tongues of sand. This is a gorgeous record.
Trying to Remember is out now on Merck.
All titles above are out now on Merck Records.
