Reviews

Review: ‘Fabric 70 – Apollonia’ (Fabric)

Matt Oliver Leave a Comment

fabric-70-apollonia

★★★★☆

If you think the club music of today has absolutely zip to say, Fabric 70 is compounding matters by barely offering you as much as a jack to obey. Mazi’s “Scene Shifter” musters a ‘just feel it’ for those feeling lost. That’s because the vibe circling is screaming volumes; gritty, hard shuffling grooves riding the Chicago expressway to Detroit and the new wave of techno, fresh out the box from the late ’80s and early ’90s.

Actually it’s not quite as old as that, despite French threesome Apollonia commendably reaching out to the back of their record bags. As they champion the upfront, the mood is of when the music had little ID —certainly without any offshoots or splinter factions — and was just recognized as what was coming out of the darkest of anti-discotheque areas.

Witihin these rules, Apollonia’s “Trinidad” bears the unmistakable bassline dive of Doug Lazy’s hip-house superpower “Let It Roll,” while the pendulously po-faced bass to Dyed’s sternly sexy remix of Daze Maxim is the essence of looking backwards to speed forwards. Little breakups of security, through glider synths on Nail’s “I’ve Been There” and the unusual occurrence of lavish strings from Funk E, are equivalent to a hit of house inhaler, with Mood II Swing’s jazzy street sway continuing concentration on core values. A mix that paints a thousand words in blue, white and red that need shouting from the rooftops.

File under: Louie Vega, Chris Carrier & Hector Moralez, Todd Terry

Album Review: Matthew Herbert / ‘The End of Silence’ (Accidental)

Matt Oliver Leave a Comment

Matthew Herbert The End of Silence

★★★★☆

Ambitious even by Matthew Herbert’s individual, shapeshifter standards intended to send synopsis writers scurrying, The End of Silence imagines the aftermath, aftershock and flashback of a bomb going off. Obviously not as simple as that, a three-part improvisation of musique concrete with real meaning, composed as a left-for-dead transmission and depicting a grim need for survival when deciding whether to lie low or make a run for it, attempts to make sense (if there is any sense to be gleaned) of such callousness. Without cheapening the sentiment, the bare bones are: the explosion hits (a real-life Libyan field recording), Herbert reacts.

Clearly you’re gonna have to get into the right frame of mind before taking this on (make sure the surround sound is sorted as well), and also understand Herbert’s development of his muse was far from the frontline but envisioned in a UK barn. Though anomalous throughout each episode, it’s rare for there to be any moments of deathly silence. Herbert and his think-tank band convey more the suspended shock of being adjacent to the blast, gunfire and combat still in muffled earshot in anticipation of further detonations. As confusion reigns a disorientating peace persists bordering on misplaced optimism, jumping like paused videotape while eerie runs of electricity tangle with genuine melody.

Ears ringing, stomach knotting, heart racing, Herbert slips you in and out of consciousness, pulls you underground and makes you scrabble back upwards toward daylight.

File under: Global Communication, Plaid, Mouse on Mars

Album Review: Karocel / ‘Plaited’ (Freude am Tanzen)

Matt Oliver Leave a Comment

Karocel Plaited

★★★★☆

Unafraid to make its perspiration visible when well prepared to make image everything, Karocel spin electro with substance without it being a wheel of fortune. The six-piece have mapped out their plan for house keepsakes the other way round, hatching an album out of a live spectacle, and it’s not hard to recognise their potential of making festival tents wheeze.

The part-time vocal of Antje Seifarth sounds like the twirling of pigtails is afoot, only thinking about becoming a madame for the evening, as you may think it should, on “Whiteout” Fast-setting stereotypes are disproved when “Don’t Play” dispatches a batch of horn players at just the right time; the slimline keyboard manufacturing and European groove mascara is allowed to hang in the air for the duration, but pleasingly the dancefloor rather than a disconnected demeanour becomes priority number one.

“Vox” provides premium breeze when ravers are gasping for air, a “Pacific State”-like weave through the atmosphere staying true to Karocel’s recurring, kitsch-tinted recognition. “Tease You” will challenge the Duke Dumonts and Breachs of this world in vying for bass-based summer standout status, well supported by the tangy retro acid-piano-horns cocktail “This One” and more strong piano vibes on “It’s Me”. With interjections set up as on-stage go-betweens placed around their heavier hitters (funk round “Watts”, jazz soother “Parallels” and “Boyz,” that comes together from a straggle of jazz ideas), Kaorcel are all set for heavy rotation.

File under: Juliet, Scope, Tomas Barfod

Compilation Review: ‘DJ Schwa – Lay It Down’ (Shades of Gray)

Matt Oliver Leave a Comment

DJ Schwa - Lay It Down

★★★☆☆

Should your body argue with Michal Ruzicka’s titular command, it could be reacting to the notion that this is a mix that would’ve been big business in the mid ’90s. Schwa collects trip-hop, lounge and acid jazz (?), deep house with a hip-hop lineage (Sarp Yilmaz flipping his brim the other way around), beats full of air kisses and music to talk over and go about your day to day to.

While the music itself doesn’t sound totally dated — Maddslinky’s bass-drenched urban ballad “Further Away” shows what the compilation can do, far and away the most enterprising cut to savage the easy listening ethos — there’s barely a wheel being reinvented in its sphere of the electronically organic. A lot of sloping pianos and pushes of placid bass file through windows wide open, siding with feather-edged keys shading from the sun as means of demonstrating a pseudo-sophistication. Eddie C’s groggy deep houser for Elina Monova lumbers off the couch to do a warm shoe shuffle, and a wee dram of dub from Soul Science makes a partial shift.

With only a smidgen of acoustica that normally pins this sort of collection toward the wallpaper of a hotel lobby, Ruzicka obviously has an out of hours session in mind, or maybe an al fresco dinner party — something to casually throw on as a go-to for when guests are en route, not something you’ll be throwing on at every turn.

File under: Jon Kennedy, Positive Flow, Superloaded