Frank & Bill :: Ma0x (7″) :: Frank & Bill’s four-track 7″ record, Ma0x, is a slab of shuffling electronics that rattles around the room like it is gravity-challenged. The bass drum is a swollen aquatic thump that implodes on itself, sucking its echo back into its own mouth. Tiny metallic percussion rattles like dust in the airducts while Frank & Bill eke out winsome melodies on aged analog equipment. “ma01” doesn’t even clear two minutes — not more than a few times around the melody line before it peters out and the aquatic bass wanders off to find a new friend. “ma04” lasts longer — the remainder of the A-side — and it wheezes on like a stuck hurdy-gurdy until night falls and we all go home. The B-side tracks, “ma02” and “ma03,” are more energetic: “ma02” sizzles with a glimmer of energy that goads the slumbering bass into a quicker pattern, while “ma03” chirps and hiccups like a clearinghouse of unused synthetic noises. The B-side is a bit reminiscent of early Aphex Twin, full of analog squelch that almost sounds human-made and not the anonymous machine music which become the buzz-sound of the closing years of the last decade.
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Sense :: 2 Day Dub (7″) :: Sense’s 2 Day Dub was released on a three colors of vinyl, an uneven split between black, pink and aqua, and the colors match the synesthetic sound of the two tracks. A-side “Tuesday Blue” begins with tiny particles of light rising against a black background until there is enough motion for the sound to evolve into a more beat-driven track. Dub only in the basest sense of the word, “Tuesday Blue” is a full-motion downtempo soundtrack piece that Michael Mann would happily use as mood music in any of his nocturnal films. “Wednesrasta” is the B-side, and it unfolds like a long lead-in to a full-blown rave track, caught on the cusp of its interminable four-on-the-floor nature by minute shards of metal which keep arresting its rhythm with their off-kilter scatter. Echoes of metal pipes clanging against the floor of an immense underground cistern float up from the depths while a thin strand of white smoke melody uncurls overhead. The elements build and collide until the techno beat gives up the ghost, fading into synthetic mist which slowly drifts apart.
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Machine Drum :: Urban Biology (2LP):: Machine Drum’s Urban Biology 2xLP begins on the city streets like nothing more than an open window onto the persistent sound of the insomnias city. “Cream Soda Part 1” plays out like the play of lights across the dark sky over the metropolis, and “Cream Soda Part 2” begins to hiccup and stutter, replaying the long introductory tones of “Cream Soda Part 1” over a haphazard snare drum and cut-up electronic squiggles and beat patterns. This is the beginning of the biology lesson: the commingling of the urban with the digital, the organic with the mechanic. “Def On It” wanders farther into cut-up glitch territory, taking a hint of the melody from the previous track and skewing it beneath a shivering, quivering beat sequence that only gets more ADD as the track progresses. “Countchocula” picks up the tiny vocal element and turns it into a full-blown demonic possession while snare and hi-hat keep the rhythm check-check-checking along as if nothing untoward is happening.
The biology lesson continue across the other three sides of the LP set, each track taking elements of the previous experiment and twisting them further in an iterative process of making the new from the old. “Berim” picks up from the scatter vocal analysis of “Countchocula,” inserting drop-outs and a jazz drummer to further the evolution of the Urban Biology sound. “Uptown” breaks with the distortion on the human voices, allowing them to clearly chatter a single word again and again while a piece of bowed metal provides the duet for the stuttering exhortation to head uptown.
“Realization” begins side three with an early dawn breaking downtempo rhythm, cut only by a recorded voice. The single voice becomes many and the laboratory experiments continue as the beat become increasingly complex and the electronic signals start to pulse and modulate over the scattered voices. The vocal skewing erupts in “Jigga Why?” and turns a hip-hop experience into a nightmarish stutter of looped vocals, oblique samples and dribbling drum rhythms.
Machine Drum is exploring the synthesis of voice and machinery in Urban Biology, working in his digital machine shop to cut and splice bubbling vocal patterns with machine music. He grafts sweet synthetic melodies onto hiccups and coughs of human words to build scarred ambient tracks like “Floss,” and he compresses a twenty-minute field recording of child at recess into an eight-minute montage of slippery voices and squelchy, propulsive beats for the final “Kids World.” Urban Biology as a whole is a laboratory notebook of experimentation, realized blueprints of an amalgamated design of fully cross-bred man and machine. It’s an interesting record of how human noises can be rhythmic instrumentation as well as melodic voices.
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Blamstrain :: Sansi Empler (12″) :: Blamstrain’s 12″, Sansi Empler, is a sampling of tracks from the full-length Ensi CD, and it is a warm envelope of their “splatterfuck smooth electronic soundscapes.” “Batman” eschews modern mythology of the Dark Knight for more ambient fare, as crystal tones pervade an atmosphere that has but a hint of menace to it. Beats lightly patter the track like soft rain against the hard city streets. “Alive in Arms” beeps and squiggles with an undercurrent of particle movement while synths roil and boil in the foreground like a pool of enraged squid. “Linja” is the soundtrack to a cross-polar flight, a machine-guided arc across the cold top of the world. You are wrapped in analog warmth as Tthe rarified air streaks past you with a hiss of ice crystals and the atmosphere lights up with streamers of solar radiation. “Goodbye p10” follows you to the frigid noise, the streamers of the Aurora Borealis still lighting the sky overhead while hot springs bubble and foam through the frigid landscape. A cross between Biosphere and less noise-inflected Gridlock, “Goodbye p10” captures both the miniscule drifts and the sweeping horizon of the arctic landscape. Samplers are for those who are curious but not foolish with their coin and, if the four tracks on Sansi Empler are any indicator, you would do well to spend your dollars on the full-release, though the thirty minutes here isn’t a bad way to go either.
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