Reviews

Compilation Review: ‘Producer 08: Makoto’ (Good Looking)

Matt Oliver Leave a Comment

Producer 08- Makoto

★★★☆☆

Celebrated Japanese technician Makoto Shimizu has run with the best in d’n’b down the years, tailoring a fluidity that sometimes plays like an audition for a Guy Ritchie movie. Completely getting the Good Looking aesthetic — the liquid nature of “Innerself” and such races effortlessly with an acceleration approaching a vanishing point — the visualization of the Progression Sessions peacemaker is one of exiting inner city life for the countryside and open road beyond.

Beginning with ultra casual, live translatable funk that’s all drop tops and coffee shops, the collection starting with a motivation for nothing more than the laid-back is something you’re actually hoping this album can’t sustain. Given the cold fresh air that’s forecast, it isn’t really a case of easing you in either, more like swapping your comfy time-killing latte to a swift round of espressos. The jazz-backed, dapper suited, surround sound-flicking drum & bass is as much about unwinding as winding your waist to, although “Enterprise” provides energetic jungle breaks for an easy rough-smooth contrast and an instant old skool flavour not just plundering mid-late ’90s D&B IQ.

Arguably Makoto’s control is for those who might class themselves as d’n’b fans from afar; it undeniably fosters its own fading into the background by its sense of the dreamy and spacious being too neat and tidy. It finishes as it starts, with barely a sweat gland exposed.

File under: EZ Rollers, LTJ Bukem, Eveson

Album Review: Washerman / ‘Raw Poetry’ (Drumpoet Community)

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Washerman Raw Poetry

★★★★☆

Silky smooth house. Purity. NYC and Chicago blooms in its family tree. Gianni Siravo’s prose expresses a love for deep, beefy beats that have probably never heard of EDM. This is a declaration of war on all dancefloor suckers with a hot-stepping sequence of time honored hustles.

Of filtered stabs, uptown swing and on “Superstring” and “Sneaker Girlz,” piano melodies that can in no way ever be retired, the engineering of a to-the-break-of-dawn vibe barely yields so much as a clearing of a vocalist’s throat – raw poetry indeed. Siravo’s playbook is full of foolproof strategies: check the metallic bump of “Siren Chords”, “Distant Planet” as a little dubbier and techier, the coloured skies of ambient forecaster “Belts of Orion”, and the Robin S bass of “Celestial Spheres.” Presumably when hitting the DJ booth Washerman brings both headphones and a clipboard.

A record solely concerned with restoring traditional values forces imagination and innovation into a weirdly negative playing of second fiddle (though perhaps in part to a self-imposed containment of equipment and technology). It sounds ‘right,’ yet the clubbing becomes hard to describe in terms other than dutiful. The reality is an album that rarely lets you down. Fluid to the max, Washerman has the stamina to go on and on, meaning if you’re buying out the bar or have new dancing shoes you wanna show off to everyone, he’s with you every step of the way.

File under: Boo Williams, Apollonia, Dexter, M@W

Compilation Review: µ-ZIQ / ‘Somerset Avenue Tracks 1992-1995’ (Planet Mu)

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u-Ziq-Somerset_Avenue_Tracks_1992-1995

★★★★☆

Found to be unsurprisingly upfront on new album Chewed Corners yet still with a degree of the unexpected, the multiples of veteran Mike Paradinas now throws open a previously vinyl-only anthology, criss-crossing 24 times over through unreleased electronic molecules for everyone to mobilize to. Standing to the left, the µ-ZIQ man’s furthermost forays do not occupy the headspace of a scientific mutineer, his sound found to be an open house. At times in fact it’s damned well straightforward, with ambient techno “Vinxel” and disarmingly unblemished keyboard solos “Air” and “Melodion” at the top of the uncomplicated contrasts in melody.

Various strange but beautiful textures (“Spooky Tooth,” “Pollux”) are moulded into shape with deftly mechanical fingers, issuing a come-and-get-me to whatever category is feeling plucky, operating a potter’s wheel spinning on a square-shaped disc, and simply clicking a switch (presumably given the timeline, triumphing with what technology was available) that clears the decks after there’s seemingly no room to budge.

If you want pistons overthrowing the factory floor and professorial madness, there’s ample confusion to get hit by. “Toy Gun #2” and ‘Boistron’ cater for all your dreams of deposed civilization, leading to aftermaths like the mourning drone “Str06,” bent counterattacks “Airto” and “Victor’s March”, and ‘Boilig’ piecing together haunted organs and test tubes. Given the epoch, none of it feels left behind, some going as far as nudging ahead of the game while standing head and shoulders above competition from the same era.

File under: Heterotic, Aphex Twin, Squarepusher

Compilation Review: Mr G / ‘Retrospective’ (Rekids)

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mr-g-retrospective_rekids

★★★★☆

Perhaps more housey than you’d expect — less about barking orders to face the front with shoulders back — Colin McBean’s archiving has got more pumps than a fiend for flat tires. Connected to techno by the applied DNA of flailing hi-hats (the ones that aren’t clipped but shake all over the place on the drum it), and sporadic doubling up on drum thickness, a funky double disc onslaught loops until hip fractures and busted tailbones have ERs heaving.

Extensive experience shows that one good lick grunting and shunting over and over (the taut temptation of “I’m Dirty”) can be all you need to hit lotto. “Hear Me Out” and “Jet Black” require only dour bass notes to round up a dance floor, though disc two shows signs of swivelling into the floor and unable to free itself from its own locked groove. This is less a problem for “Lights” and “The Day After B”, turning disco filtered love trains into high speed rail links, and gentle giant “My Father’s Farda.”

‘Proper’ techno murk comes from swirling boiler “Pepsi”, with subliminal advertising possibly at work to gauge the tastes of a new generation; and “Danger” boxing you until birds are spinning around your dome. Vocal samples verge on the unusual: “Did You Know” will play on your nerves, Jodeci ooze over the unreleased pleasure/pain experience “Shelter”, and the message on “Going Home” seems a bit wasted on an otherwise fine ambient cascade helping treat summer stereos and poolside walkmans.

File under: The Advent, Carl Cox, Tommy Atkins