Author: Matt Oliver

Album Review: Rhythm Plate / ‘Off the Charts’ (Lost My Dog)

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Rhythm Plate Off the Charts

★★★★☆

Skin-tanning soul that looks past the cocktail umbrella, funky house that can poke its tongue out, electro pop gloss opening curtains to spectacular views in an ’80s scented paradise…Matt Rhythm and Ant Plate have pulled out all the stops as well as their own fingers. Fifteen years on from their opening release – they either should know what goes into an album or are really plunging themselves in at the deep end after nothing but 12”s and EPs – it’s a live conversion sounding far more Transatlantic than its humble UK grounding lets on. And they have one CSI Miami appearance more than the rest of us.

With lyrics pleasing in their irregularity (“Blue Ocean”), ice pole-cool pop extensions and slick dance floor grabs (“Not Like That”), the Plate’s pot pourri is loaded with variables that easily take up the challenge of being able to act streetwise before moving back towards the sensitive. Snippy houser “Satellite” links into electro heat-seeker “Digital Entry”, followed by hip-hop boom-boxer “Cut Price Air Cut”; then “Keep a Light On” and “Moments” slide like an ice cube down a glass of good stuff, both building on the duo’s bedrock of producing instrumental and incidental backdrops.

It’s unclear what possessed RP to include “King of Rubbish,” a branch out too many that acts like a post-midnight set of overfed Gremlins. Skip this, extend your summer with the rest and let the Plate hit you.

File under: YSE, Bleep District, Fred Everything

Compilation Review: ‘The Gym: Muscle Tuff’ (The Gym)

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The Gym Muscle Tuff

★★★☆☆

The Gym collective lay down a fantastically sleeved eight point plan of how to get your pulse alight. Start off slowly, then vary the reps and intensity.

After a soulful pep talk from Josa Peit, Brandt Brauer Frick’s “Two in a Bush” is a once-smooth techno pulley scratched ragged, The Gym owners tuning a treadmill that throws up objects to disrupt your stride. The dulled techno of “Reset My Mind” is Bodo Elsel favoring mental over physical conditioning, an unblinking, pained vocal drone looking for the reboot button as if aghast at its own reflection. Strictly for gym loners that go through their own rituals before bench-pressing twice their bodyweight with their little finger, the album is generally for those wanting to box themselves into a corner. Don’t expect a fronting instructor to take the lead, though there’s more a group effort about the disco confidence coursing through Muff Deep. Much like a treadmill visit, Muscle Tuff is perfunctory in doing you good, though by all means gorge on Douglas Greed’s nasty bassline slingshot.

James Braun and Dan M’s “People Move” and Bernard Crochet’s “Dawn Raid…,” turning bass over for a leaden techno skipping rope, are further engagements in focus mode; chiselled sparseness that’s ready for the gladiatorial. Dollkraut’s tinman perseveres into a jazzy deep house getdown, and Max Graef supplies the collection’s breather, revelling in a dizzy spell with bass rebounds and time/space appraisal.

File under: Nina Kraviz, Aroop Roy, Pierre Chevallier

Album Review: DeepChord / ’20 Electrostatic Soundfields’ (Soma)

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SOMA DEEPCHORD OUTSIDE CD_DPS1 Booklet Double Page Spread (with

★★★★☆

Much like last year’s Sommer, DeepChord drifts to an ever-blurring set of compass points. Broadly a chillout album, Rod Modell’s construction of a seemingly inviting hammock is made with bits of barbed wire and can swing in the eye of a storm. He imagines many environments – a life aquatic, the rainbow’s end, Area 51, a higher plain, or simply a space guided by a shapeshifting subtlety.

Tracks smudge into one another in fluid mutation. There is the occasional upsurge of distinction, such as “Whispering Pines” and “Raval” emerging through the clouds like a skyscraper, while “Barcelona” bizarrely enlightens to a backdrop of traffic. But such announcements tend to evaporate into the next scene as Modell values long and short pooled through a slow dub hypodermic. The rippling anonymity of loops creates a spell-caster. But let it get inside your head and the detection of prickles and pressures are cause for insomnia. As it corkscrews in lapsed time, the likes of “Aerosphere” and “De Wallen” tick to buried house tempos. “Lotus Leaves” suddenly leaves you lost and without cellphone coverage, and “Trompettersteeg”‘s alarm clock stimulates your conscience further, rather than getting you to wake up.

Aware again of the album experience, a collective body tossing and turning as one, its magnetic mystery invents its own reality from a five year period prior to 2013. Modell apparently doing very little to effect so much is the IDM oath, where episodes of restlessness uncross a human side.

File under: Echospace, Soultek, Basic Channel

Album Review: Machinedrum / ‘Vapor City’ (Ninja Tune)

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Machinedrum Vapor City

★★★☆☆

Vapor City accurately pinpoints a post-fallout environment powered by quicksilver scurries and reverbs decorating requiems in dub and bass. Like skimming a blimp across a lake, Travis Stewart’s IQ in dynamics and hydraulics gives the bulky and burdened a frothy quality in subzero.

Sustaining junctions in post-dubstep, footwork/juke, and jungle/hardcore, “Infinite Us” is near enough jungle jazz/intelligence from the 90s, and “Don’t 1 2 Lose U” plays at being Zomby, rave chords picking at the brickwork of a mausoleum. Provocative to a point in rigidly setting out chord structures and triggers, Stewart’s highs tunnelling towards daylight, referee face-offs between the restful and the unsettling, skeletal against billowing. “Center You Love” very nearly aims dubstep for the coffee table, where the atmospheric shaping of layers, hazing and fading on the timeout “Vizion”, close eyes in the infinite space between club and headphone while tugging at the throttle.

With a longing glance at Hyperdub-style electro/R&B on “U Still Lie”, any moments of tension have a way of nixing themselves, and predicted dirges – jump-off “Eyesdontlie” one to fix an unflinching gaze – end up wearing a daisy chain in a world, despite so many signposts, that’s easy to get lost in. When it comes to the continuity of Room(s), the ubiquitous pitched down vocal saps some of the excitement, and similar still, for all its undeniable cutting edge, somehow it doesn’t quite feel it’s doing enough to pull away from its peers.

File under: Sepalcure, Burial, Benton