Reviews

Album Review: Ellen Allien / ‘LISm’ (BPitch Control)

Matt Oliver Leave a Comment

ellen_allien-lism

★★★☆☆

Forty-five minutes long and based on a theatrical dance performance — probably one of the few formats Allien has yet to make her own — this single episode is ambitious next levelism taking made-for-stage music on a drama schooling through analogue and digital, indulging Allien’s inner thespian while bringing DJ culture to the boards.

Strumming acoustic premonitions from a rocking chair, under a moonlit sky in the middle of nowhere, a low-rent start feels for the tonal and abstract, laying a loose beginning-middle-end foundation. Bringing dirge drums to the wilderness, Allien’s loneliness is abundantly clear until, planed by electronics, a burgeoning curiosity splutters into life as clips and bleeps activate, turning the barren into a field of randomized LEDs.

Not a logical progression, but the ‘real’ Allien is now coming through, ever poised to spring the next wave of sounds. After a period stalking prey through fiddled frequencies, still switching between processed and organic, she goes into deep synthesized thought, beaming a free-jazz flashback future-bound. That intro already seems like a lifetime ago. Becoming industrially, then humanly pensive, the patchwork evolves evermore erratically, making the visuals to go with it hard to sketch out. Around two-thirds in, deep jackin’ house takes over in a short-lived, stage-abandoning, LSD-ready experience.

Back to brooding, Allien’s last ten minutes are spent placing leaden pulses and hopeful fragments into an electro/new wave cliffhanger. Brave, if in need of CliffsNotes to help you keep up.

File under: Apparat, Boom Bip, Roll the Dice

Compilation Review: ‘Gilles Peterson – Black Jazz Radio’ (Snow Dog Records)

Matt Oliver Leave a Comment

Gilles Peterson - Black Jazz Radio

★★★★☆

The reissue market is always a competitive one, but when Gilles Peterson says he’s gonna head a compilation concentrating on jazz, soul and funk masterpieces from a label to celebrate, Black Jazz Radio puts a bodyguard on the dial so that you won’t think of touching it. Exhibiting masters at work from an imprint that enjoyed a relatively short-lived existence but long-term significance, Peterson takes you right back to the watershed of the era, smartly attired with a rat race frown furrowing through the ’70s.

The show starts off sweetly and easygoing before getting into the nitty gritty, with the tired-sounding “Beauty and The Electric Tub” by Henry Franklin shaking itself out of a slump for 12 minutes. Track by track musicians start working overtime, freestyling while making a point (solos may ramble, but they still pay respect to its backers keeping up) and showing enduring influence. Rudolph Johnson’s “The Highest Pleasure” is steeped in hip-hop vibes, a little Latin peeps over Walter Bishop and Gene Russell, and Doug Carn fights the power. Rolling stone sleuthing and crimefighter compulsion from Cleveland Eaton has its quipping funk pinned by eager violins, sent slinking back further by Kellee Patterson’s soul lullaby. The entire Black Jazz catalog is to be reintegrated across a three-way mix collection/history lesson, and predictably Peterson has started the ball rolling just fine.

File under: Now-Again, Perception & Today, Freestyle

Album Review: Marc Romboy & Ken Ishii / ‘Taiyo’ (Systematic Recordings)

Matt Oliver Leave a Comment

PackshotSYST0016-2

★★★★☆

Holding its own like a premium tire designed to skim across black ice, two tech-house titans survey the Tao of Taiyo, cracking their knuckles and working out game-winning strategies while menace and the need to mesmerise runs through their minds. All via the middle man-cutting medium of a modem.

Cased in a sphere of wires, “Seiun” loops over and under itself while bass rises to the top like a controlled endorphin rush. “Helium” is a comedown with ache undercutting it, foraging away in an out of sight bunker while wisps of magic fill the air, though the rather too funky bassline dubbing up the still is the package’s one thorny issue.

“Dopplereffekt” hammers and heals, tech-house that has a synth rhythm jumping up and down with casual Balearic knowledge, seeing if it can cool the striking of the iron. “Suisei” is another moody worker of thrills, squirming electronics and acid infiltration plaited around a deep trance body, lifting arms and making brains connect the dots. The title track, showing awestruck tendencies before a bassline propeller tells it to quit dreaming, is your peak time rumpus or end of the night race to the finish line. Closed out by “Der Strand” bathing itself in newfound bliss, it’s an achievement to make a mini-album of only seven tracks and create logical progressions, including scene setting headers and footers. And of course, without any physical interaction.

File under: Bodzin, FLR, The Analog Session

Album Review: Lusine / ‘The Waiting Room’ (Ghostly International)

Matt Oliver Leave a Comment

Lusine The Waiting Room

★★★★☆

A dread-filled visit to the dental or doctor’s surgery this is not. Seattle’s Jeff McIlwain marks the moment where his name is called again with steady electronics and deep club determiners, within the general handling of similar but divergent electro DNA. Its disparate inserts are obvious; the way it hangs together just as much, becoming frontline relevant from whichever angle it’s travelling from.

Exclusively electronic doesn’t make for a virtual world of polygon windows, regardless of “Stratus” stepping into a dodecahedron-shaped rash of looped synths. Lusine’s angles of cosmic disco represent the challenge of the album, attempting and usually succeeding in gathering degrees of emotion (not even to humanise particularly) from the angular and steadfastly mechanical or artificial. “On Telegraph” hypnotically moves in no direction in particular, and “February” is sure to be big once the weather is more charitable.

Standing next to more image-conscious electro-pop (“Get The Message”), Lusine’s methods fiddle with differing strands running hot and cold at the same time, juggling processed vocals made distant (“Another Tomorrow,” a love song handled by robots) with balmy synth provisions. The variations continue with “First Call” coming off as a sneakily slick Hot Chip effort with more plug-ins and jerks of machinery. For an album that’s not especially light, it is served well by a double definition of flexibility.

File under: Vector Lovers, Woolfy vs Projections, John Tejada