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Geoff White :: Ince EP (Spectral Sound, 12″)
My secret theory is that Geoff White is a rocker. He gets up everyday,
puts Bon Jovi on the turntable and then goes to work on seriously bad
ass house music. At some point he just becomes overwhelmed with the
guitar and well, it gets splattered like a Kraut-rock number all over
clickitedy funk-hop. His LP with Stewart Walker for Force Inc fused the
elegance of the guitar into house so well it proved Dave Chappelle’s
thesis getting whitey on the floor. His work molts careful and
fastidious microtonal work outs, so laced with layer upon layer, that
the full sound only reaches about a week out, to washes of processed
guitar ala Fennesz. Ince is very close to perfection, the rest of the
EP is filler.
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The Vanisher :: The Tic-Tac Tactic (Spectral Sound, 12″)
I imagine The Vanisher speaks in 7337 speak, his name certainly recalls
the |-|4x0rness of early rave years, but this obfuscating raver imports all
of yesteryears inventions into d.s.p.-ified slabs of vinyl that make
you aware of how little difference there is between Kirk DeGiorgio and
modern day tech output. Vocoded deep-house divas, driving electro
basslines, all the things of house’s origins glazed in a production
style reminiscent of Magda. Anyway, good tunes that melodically play
with tech’s over-stuffed glitchy exterior and the smooth sounds of old.
Track 6, “Toothpaste,” is particular experimental misfiring transistors,
bongos for percussion, feedback, a willingness to embrace dislocation
in one package.
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Jeff Samuel :: AWT EP (Spectral Sound, 12″)
Jeff Samuel, I’m willing to wager, lives in Detroit –hold on Googling
him, oops wait, totally wrong. He’s from Ohio, along with Geoff White, and
apparently his first entrance into electronica was from Detroit’s
Claude Young at an ele_mental Collective show. Anyway, Jeff is now
based in Seattle designing video game sounds –I have to admit I
didn’t see this coming. I was pretty confident this was a Detroit
paxahau-er who’d feel more at home in Berlin than the States, but ahh
well you can’t deduce everything from a person from their music.
I guess now that I think about it, his patters of minimal 4/4s and slightly
retro noises do sound a bit like an old Nintendo games; the songs build
up slowly, the bass making a pronounced entrance into quarter crunched
arcade effects. Imagine playing a bass, one reverbed drum, while
beating the jump button in beat. A circling effect of video game themes
build a psychedelic mantle around the song, the 4/4 are so submerged
you hardly even remember it’s a house tune. Two C64 stabs complete the
melody and Jeff breaks down all these modules of melody into unique
clusters, producing one hell of a track. The following one hits harder,
but bores me with the usual quirky minimal noises.
Side B starts off with that entire ample mix time thing I never get quite used to in dance
music –you know the repeating house beat for 2 – 3 minutes so you can
layer it into the next track? Then it builds another Nintendo-esquee
number similar to Thomas Jirku’s recent Klaxxon release;
ultra-lo-fi intro then one monotonous pseudo-piano stab –not loving
this song but it’s still good. The EP ends on a high note, just the
right amount of minimal stutter, video game melody and cut ambient loops.
It all sounds like children’s music somehow, naively in love with
itself. This EP managed to delight and conflict my tastes enough that I
needed more space to review it than the others. That’s a good sign.
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Audion :: Kisses EP (Spectral Sound, 12″)
Audion sounds an alarm on this one. That alarm though is so
distorted I can’t tell if this is a chance to get down or break shit,
but Audion’s so clubby that I feel like I have to say, this isn’t my thing;
But well it’s actually pretty good. Distorted, chopped up, angry house
music that’s just unrelenting. The opening and closing tracks should be
dropped at raves, constantly, unrelentingly, many times in a night.
Scores additional points for taking near trance levels of build-up into
amazingly up-tempo crescendos instead of another break down by
incorporating cut and slash style breakcore tactics to a dance tune.
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All titles are out now on Spectral Sound.
