THE ADVISORY CIRCLE - OTHER CHANNELS

'What the 70s really looked like' goes the tagline for "The 70s Dimension", the idea being that the utter marginalia of a time (the disc compiles inane TV commercials) speaks more truthfully than a run-through of iconic images. The DVD is a release off of Craig Baldwin's label - Other Cinema - and these are indeed the very frequencies of Other Channels, the same broadcasts of memory & archival delirium. Channels, changing by remote, heading into an unreliable past left indistinct & disproportionate. Childhood here is diffuse and roaming - a string-section swoon (equally applicable to spy romance or an ad for a furniture sale), might be followed by oscillators and blown bottles (i.e. John Barry *click* John Baker). Fixations of prequel EP Mind How You Go also get a renewed season: those public information films - here the disquieting "Frozen Ponds PIF" - and a lot of Roger Roger style library synths. Probably the most diverse Ghost Box record so far, maybe even the first in a marked departure w/ its Penguin book-cover traded in for a polychromatic 16mm dissolve. What would a widening spectrum imply - examination of a less specified collective unconscious? Or maybe just a later one, w/ a vague chronological drift forward/backwards alongside present time. A speculation is haunting me.

BLEVIN BLECTUM - GULAR FLUTTER

Turns out the octopus is drawn by China Mieville who recently wrote of the creature's "taxonomic transgression" in an essay on Weird fiction. Why this choice for sui generis glitch artist Blevin Blectum? Gular flutter is apparently the "pulsation of the upper esophagus in some species of birds in response to heat-stress" & the song titles contain references to birds, feathers, swans, but also snails. It doesn't add up - contradicting or irreducible anatomies, a body left unrecognizable or even imperceptible through dashing diagonals & skewed processing. There's a voice, a violin, perhaps a nanolooping Gameboy and then the rest, none of which sounds purely CPU-generated but all of which is mangled, flipped, stuttered, crunched, elongated, or morphed by Max/MSP-style granular recombination. Tracks develop through restless shifts and scatters, impossible to draw a bead on but still riveting & pursuable. It's an odd record and an odd time for it - released after a four-year hiatus like an abnormal growth from an old antiseptic experiment - "glitch" not as edgy beat-sharpener but as idiosyncratic index of personality (there's a nameless but quietly enduring subsubgenre here perhaps spanning the Blectums, Sonig, Active Suspension, DAT Politics, et al. 'Clicks' never really cut it for them).

THE CARETAKER - PERSISTENT REPETITION OF PHRASES

"Persistent repetition" works on a couple levels - inexorable return of the past (as usual, signified by 30's jazz, Al Bowlly, etc.), but also the Caretaker's own compulsion to produce unending variations on a single idea. The Caretaker - as in, of the Overlook Hotel - makes memory audible, but a deliberately impersonal memory (i.e. not somebody's prom-night set to Chris De Burgh) safely tucked away in the distance so as to appear collective. Name-checks 'The Shining' & its ballroom scenes, but uncanny use of song is a common scary-movie device - Lynchian Roy Orbinson, 'Jeepers Creepers', or 'Room 1408''s forewarnings by way of the Carpenters, to name a few. The releases are difficult to assess because not crafted 'albums' but more akin to spectacles enabling one to "see dead people", the repeating excess (last was a sextuple album) meant to hold claim to memory's permanence over linear timelines. This edition in particular seems to emphasize how songs prolong & reverberate (echoes of dub or Akira Rabelais' Eisoptrophobia) w/ each note hanging frozen in the air for hypothetical eternity. As for those track titles, the jury's still out.

CLARK - TURNING DRAGON

Three tracks in, I was enthusiastically anticipating a severe wall-to-wall assembly line of deconstructed dance music. Then the familiar flooded in - those detuned watercolor melodies splitting the difference between cerebral & sensitive. Initially frustrating but not altogether unwelcome (or unexpected), it's the first in a series of complications undergone by this slightly misshapen set. Clark can be underrated for his ambiguity (stylistic shifts, once 'Chris Clark'). He's received as a minor Warp auteur with a signature less legible or idiosyncratic than those of his peers. Turning Dragon provides a scant program - modestly put forth as a left-over collection of 'danceable' material, title/cover evokes J-cyberpunk but tossed off 'ancient sex position' reference is also plausible. Ultimately, it's not much of a problem or even a skewed asset since elusive/anonymous matches the compiled trackiness of the material (tracky IDM, oxymoronic). The usual 'bedroom' warp and woof - derangement, disruption, detail (championed & maligned in equal measure) - but now contending w/ a larger unambiguous pulse.

DJ SPRINKLES - MIDTOWN 120 BLUES

DJ Sprinkles is an early 90's dance incarnation of Terre Thaemlitz before he moved towards electroacoustic/ambient/avant music (deepness runs between Moodymann & Pauline Oliveros). The return is serendipitous as this plays like smoke clearing from the minimal-deep house tussle of the last couple years: stripped down, a surfeit of subtleties, probably mixes well w/ the Dixon/Schwarz/Cassy line. On the other hand, the narrative is explicitly its own - "House isn't so much a sound as a situation" goes the opening salvo followed by a righteous embittered call to retrace the erase-marks left by forgotten struggles of the disenfranchised. Particular ire is reserved for the deterritorialization of NY club culture by pop vocals, Madonna and other accessibility cash-ins; tacky flash which, in a different scene, might invert as the very sign of local vitality (e.g. UK garage, dancehall, etc.). The case is made for 'minimal' working as a historically specific term - not a "style" or a floating globalized IKEA surface - but a lost rooted vibe, as dreamy or refined as the story went. Situation ends up inscribed in sound as well - "to preserve the full dynamic range of the original recordings this album was mastered without compression..." - again, staunchly withdrawn from the market-ready standard because gentle & spacious. Sleeve by Laurence Rassel - slightly ghastly portraits of jouissance - suggests affinity w/ today's other mournful dance autobiographies (Shedding the Past, Untrue). This is more didactic but more gorgeous.

DOUBTFUL GUEST - ACID SAUNA

Interesting how Planet µ could sidestep the 'IDM problem' & foster burgeoning sounds-of-now (breakcore, dubstep) precisely because the scenes grew sufficiently delocalized. The likes of drill-n-bass are a persistent poltergeist (subtext: cautionary tale against pulverized vitals) but the knot between brutal functionalism and beatnik dissertation only grows tighter. As for the old guard, in the best cases - when everything is an ultra-knowing, studious retooling - rogues (Paradinas, James, Jenkinson, etc) become relics, their siphoning almost ennobled into an act of salvaging. Acid Sauna is Doubtful Guest's debut but she 'still kills the old way' twisting classic acid through the distortions of a (surprisingly dark, wicked) personal memoir. The preference is to unfurl & sear rather than pummel, evoking the stark 303 spirit of Phuture but w/ all the dingy warehouse reverberation & chiaroscuro burnt in. Edges towards gabba at times but a crass affront to subtlety/propriety is 1) refreshing when not the solitary MO, and 2) entirely appropriate - it's "Aciiiiiid!", some raucousness is called for.

FLUTER & DISSIDENT - OCCULTURED BOX

When are you going to let me out of this box? To my mind, something of an unofficial expansion pack to Paradox's "I Get a Kickback" - shades of Pandora as in emanations of virulent evil but most of all, the ensnarement into madness found in Lovecraft. Pulpy (it's not above the moody vocal snippet or the vortex of CG tentacles on the sleeve) but utter ruination remains an etched omen, articulated in offscreen implication & w/ unexpected nuance ("Fluter in Hell" - unlikely title & a more unlikely followthrough). "Only a dancer with 8 legs / drummer with 8 arms, can keep up with this beat" - Cthuloid abundance thwarts the scope of cognition on the floor. Drums like corridors, rhythms, their traversals in attempt to map impossible entireties of space. Finally, "Everything old is new again", the paradox of ancient-beyond or (more fanfictional but no less grandiose): a parallel world's Wormhole back to drumfunk's future in encounter w/ 96 Source Direct. Well, almost that good.

FLYING LOTUS - LOS ANGELES

Trip hop is back? Or it never left if you care to trace the thread from Entroducing to Donuts to the choice between Ghost Dog soundtracks to a widened net spanning the likes of Prefuse 73, Chocolate Industries, or Riow Arai. The distinction of today's beathead seems to be an upgraded electronic circulatory system - cue from Madlib & Dilla sampling Raymond Scott, the cosmic touch of Sa-ra, rave/chiptune-plundering Timbaland, etc. - but digital precision ill-suits the subterranean vibe. Hence, 'wonky' & its claim over the offbeat as corrective to quantized programming, eventually overcompensating, pushing contingency past 'humanization' to the point of woozy meltdown. Los Angeles goes adrift w/ druggy viewfinder in rotoscope - unstable liquefied kicks and distant claps provided as tenuous contours but otherwise an amorphous haze of light and color. Drums are panoramic, melodic snippets sound reversed, scribbles are in oscillation rather than vinyl; there's very little resembling the reliable looping sample or break. That said, texture & THC remain central values along w/ an oblique nod to jazz (a la Jelinek though much is made of Flying Lotus's relation to Alice Coltrane). It's like trip hop.

GANG GANG DANCE - SAINT DYMPHNA

Eclectic but through an alchemy approaching divergent genres like polyvalent sparks of color. There is a guiding light - a kind of generous Dionysian intuition - which aligns drum-circles, electronics, & song along an easy continuum (Yamataka Eye might be a kindred spirit). Sound & rhythm are sculpted - there's a clear amount of studio-care taken - but the arrangements feel free-form, sprinkled, dripped, splashed through a bold will to amorphousness. Audible engagements include house, grime, even reggaeton - perhaps a map of postulated space where post-punk's devotion to dub/world/etc. was a point of view that never fizzled or consolidated. Liz Bougatsos' vocals also stretch backwards - comparable to Siouxsie Sioux but think primarily along the percussive path of The Creatures or the Basement Jaxx collaboration i.e. extensions & windows of possibility over establishment. Had a slight spit-take moment when Ruff Sqwad's Tinchy Stryder shows up to spit some bars & another at the stock "scream" keyboard sound in "Inners Pace" (I can't help it), but the nagging tug of stretching-it works in service of the loose inclusive perimeter. Arts and crafts, affable cheapness, "it's all music" and a small miracle that it doesn't feel too lost or labored.

THE GASLAMP KILLER - I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE

For the weird - no tracklisting but the coordinates should be familiar to the borderline-Pavlovian type of hip hop fan whose ears perk up at the off-kilter. Unorthodox in the sense of Def Jux's various sacrileges (Company Flow appear) but gentler, fuzzier, because more lost in its crosscuts between trip hop bedding (Vadim, Krush) & electronic undercurrents (Oizo, Broadcast re-calibrated for the context). Rap anomalies like Roots Manuva's "Witness" & Edan's psych get fostered under a shelter where they can finally pass as normal, be themselves w/ their chums, etc. Forefathers (as evinced in previous mixes) also lean trippy w/ the roadmap tracing back to krautrock & the early use of analog electronics in bands like USA & Silver Apples. Absence of mainstream tracks semi-conspicuous given the alleged impact of crunk/hyphy on The Wonk (or ask The Outsider), but then again, 'weird' is pretty much every non-rap/r&b fan's way in, possibly calling for a refusal of "Mr. Me Too" & the like for slightly more rarified territory. Surrounding antagonisms aside (purism/otherness and this Snoop filler = proto-wonky, yes?), I think fixation wins over self-consciousness here.

GEENEUS - VOLUMES: ONE

Lovely little line walked here between auteur production showcase and a more representative scene overview (Sceeneus?). I mulled about for an afternoon trying to figure out what 'Yellowtail' reminded me of only to realize it might be the theme to 'Jaws'. Works best mid-mix - bass lurching in from below before the big attack (that amazing discord of cascading synths like a singularly punishing 'game over' sound effect). Jarring stuff but a genuine plurality of modes show up here - yes the dubstep nod & the sinister Green Velvety "In To The Future", but also a portion of female vocals, sensuousness, "Emotions" as in yearning or even unabashed rapture. Mix on disc 2 is as good a summary as any w/ full attendance of anthems & the multifaceted vibe one always hopes to find in a fledgling style. As for 'Funky House' - not JB obviously but would a Fela angle be stretching it? Something other than "2-step retread w/ training wheels" or "Funky?... House?" anyhow.

AKIKO KIYAMA - 7 YEARS

Recourse to 'sound design' in defense of minimal was always a little backhanded: sumptuous surfaces but a minor, indulgent, finally empty pleasure (everybody: "cause that music got no groove..."). Surface & emptiness - elsewhere hallmarks of Japanese culture & Kiyama's music mirrors the austere techno of Fumiya Tanaka & Riou made a decade earlier, as well as the more outre experiments by people like Ryoji Ikeda. Her rather SAW II myspace page (Band Members: frayed fabric, Influences: more fabric, Sounds Like: some fur) attests to a softer focus - still a bit clinical but untidy like cellular traffic or perhaps a more grayscale Cadenza rhizome. Makes sense that she showed up on the recent DE9 mix (M_nus palette - "Ant" like a microcosm of "Bay of Figs") - a very Live anatomy to her track-structures & modulated interwoven strands. Individual fragments are also feasibly interchangeable (notation mostly restricted to mysterious/paranoid semitone steps), but there's a nurturing sense of alchemy here - a rippling blip for a sublow throb, the tickle of a delayed clipping kick - minutiae for days & substantially complementary. Somewhere an astonishing shakuhachi plays over the concréte and I didn't think of "Fizheuer Zieheuer" but Toru Takemitsu. Is it just me?

THE MOLE - AS HIGH AS THE SKY

Five-turntable loop management experiment - "Starchy Root Machine" as the Mole calls it - sounds like the sort of heroic old school science one would exhibit for the case against all things Ableton. This is studio work (SRM is a live-performance incarnation) but also firmly organic - 'The Mole' w/ actual dirt once allegedly used for chance vinyl-skip grooves. More likely here is a load of masking tape marking custom extracts of percussion, bare vocals, or modular synths. Texture & composition bring to mind Motorbass - the by-hand analog touch (recall the turntablism of "Flying Fingers"), compartmentalized space for each ingredient, looping phrases awkwardly abridged for tension but also the musicality of repetition. Lots of faith in the incremental as well, ebb & flow w/ remarkably patient EQ moving through the gradations of a bassline over the course of several minutes. Highlights are many but I especially like how "Alice, You Need Him" makes the least generous case for minimal - "bunch of plip plop" - sound actually pretty great.  

ALEX MOULTON - EXODUS

If there is justice in the world, why couldn't this be The One. Oh Human After All, come answer for your youthful & numerous progeny w/ their piercing thrills and their injunctions to enjoy. A solid link exists between Exodus and Daft Punk except this one threads through the luminosity of Discovery, the sci-fi saga of 'Interstella 5555', & the thoroughly 70's aesthetic of 'Electroma'. Moulton is a contemporary here w/ a heart set in the same yesteryear of Tangerine Dreams & Moroders, Logan's Runs & Barbarellas. He's particularly keen on the faded era of the Album; those bygone days of sweeping journeys and conceptual storytelling (his background is in film). Behold the awesomeness of that cover (credit: fantasy artists Julie Bell & Boris Vallejo) - "Sizzling Galactic Romance" and it's for real, this dance so lovingly stuffed w/ peaks and valleys - dynamics! - & moment-to-moment dramatic cues. A score of electro-grooves, ambient downtime, plus live drumming excursions - ambitious & certainly more expansive than immediate but at the moment I think that may be the righteous path.

PORTISHEAD - THIRD

"You turn myself to me" - a line characteristic of this remarkably bleak album, deadlocked upon the splits and chasms which undermine self-perception; the 'you', maybe a man, but fundamentally a shadowy impalpable outside somehow always there to pull the rug away & shatter all certitude. Aches & ruminates along the lines not of 'what did you mean' but 'what did I mean', a despair of being without any bearings or ways of translating contingency into coherence - the next line "recognize the poison in my heart" suggests only an unwanted or even traumatic truth of oneself as something monstrous. Tempting to think of Beth Gibbons' voice - forever frail & anguished - as a 'pure' expression of such themes, except Portishead remains a very stylized act, if no longer trip hop, then still brimming w/ studio effects, Radiophonic texture and cinema quotes (the Schifrin loop now traded for a synth coda reminiscent of Carpenter or Fabio Frizzi). It's not an unaffected approach & there's particular interest in blurring between the voice & the sounds - e.g. the gasping processed drums in "Plastic", the sunken barbershop in "Deep Water", the mantra-like epilogue, the way the word 'follow' bleeds into eternity on "The Rip" & gets anxiously echoed by a sustained string in "Threads". Presence but denaturalized because tampered w/ or merely recorded (recall Barrow & Utley sampling vinyl-pressed sessions of themselves). But also - "I can't divide or hide from me" - a performance losing to voice, in antagonism & withering away.

PYHA - HAUNTED HOUSE

Extreme unlikelihood of the source - Korean, 14 years old - ends up as an excellent argument for the subgenre. Black metal: universal force of horror, beyond cultural or terrestrial bounds, insidiously possessing any given person of the proper depressive temperament. Similar sort of meditative malevolence as Burzum but where Vikernes' story fell to irredeemable real-world violence, Pyha allegedly mourns for a peace forever lost. It's difficult to tell but cryptic works better for it. Snippets of wartime speeches, snapshots of a nation's shame, Haunted House as in a kind of return-of-the-repressed ghost story - all clues rife w/ historical political resonance but told through the wailing of the abandoned. Tempo is uncommonly slow, crawling, deadened, the production values coarsely lo-fi & stained w/ emulsion grain. 'Peace' in this case is undoubtedly an anarchic pre-lanugage zone, darkly pure, suggesting a teen angst & nihilism that's disturbingly lucid. Is he really who he claims to be? Maybe, maybe not but it doesn't really matter.

SKULL DISCO - SOUNDBOY'S GRAVESTONE GETS DESECRATED BY VANDALS

Connoisseurship of erosion; the dubstep's almost incidental. Skull Disco's totems - sleeves by Zeke Clough - all mythic abomination and coral-like skeletons w/ attendant fuzz of bacterial life. Presumably life as in undeath as well - "Death Is Not Final", each necrotic burble and tick doubling as drums in ritualistic resurrection. Unsettling touches like a tape recorded voice deteriorating into garble and swathes of Basic Channel - signpost du jour for refinement - but here w/ macabre purpose, hovering like the inevitable creep of John Carpenter's fog. As for desecrating vandals (i.e. remixers), 'they were never to be seen again...' which is to say chilly atmosphere wins across the board, leaving vapor trails between the (somewhat) divergent malefactors (Brendon Moller's Force Tracks style microhouse, Pole's renewed dubtronica, DJ Rupture, etc.) Nothing as promising as the Villalobos remixes but the expansion is compelling. The crossroads - 'turning', infecting; crossbones - not final but pretty certain.

TOBACCO - FUCKED UP FRIENDS

The same flourishing retro-synths as parent band Black Moth Super Rainbow but honed in & streamlined across less varied architecture. Drums are now explicitly, exclusively based in hip hop. The Boards of Canada comparisons are warranted, but the tone is less elegiac than lightheartedly dazed & rollicking - more authentically "70's" - w/ sun-baked consistency (or distilled sameyness) throughout. Feels almost decadent to enjoy, like a balm spun from some lost Gemm holy grail, L'Illustration Musicale multiplied by a gold mine of breaks or some other bit of make-believe prescience. All those luxurious timbres - Mellotron flutes, buzzing bass, sparkling bloops - transposing like a sequence of petals in bloom, also bringing to mind the Tomita convert who finds poetry in a sawtooth retracing the steps of a triangle. Wallpaper at the end of the day, I suppose, but what patterns & possibly your favorite colors too. (Final note: a lonely Aesop Rock blips up midway but it just wasn't meant to be).

ZOMBY - WHERE WERE U IN 92?

Similar angle to Burial but as carny instead of melancholic. The gRavediggaz, maybe. Significantly, this generation Dead is too young to have witnessed the consensus peak-time of the continuum. Remnants & mementos are second-hand - cassettes from older siblings, discarded flyers, pirate radiowaves held for ransom. "I was not there." Sound is replete w/ period detail - rave-horns, crude pitch-shifting divas, protojungle breaks - special FX of yesterday, now slightly risible (the vintage vocal-science of old Reinforced tracks once got a spontaneous howl from a friend of mine) but of course, deeply cherished. Elision of the actual experience only serves to heighten the imaginary and missed sense of subcult (be)longing. The step backwards suggests that destination was always disappointment. Credit for use of anachronistic samples (Daft Punk, Aaliyah, Gucci Mane, Street Fighter II) not as punch-lines but as faith in the subsuming power of glorified chaos - phantasy rave forever unmindful or even innocent of the politics of taste. (Extra credit for also producing some blinding 08-in-08 12''s).

NICO NICO DOUGA RYUUSEIGUN

Nippon hype ticker: Fame for 15 minutes to 15 people vs. 30 seconds to 300,000. Influences: invasive banner ads, 2ch memes, twitter updates, animated gifs, RSS feeds, rapidshares of anime OPs, ASCII art, one too many clicks, lolcats, staying indoors. The parody of a parody in an insular vortex of references of references. 8/08, C74 - 35,000 manga/anime/game vendors vs. 500,000 ravenous consumers. "[The game] contains considerably fewer glitches, but, objectively, is still very poorly-made, and virtually unplayable." Virtual idol Hatsune Miku signs to a major & charts at #5 on Oricon. T-pain's Thr33 Ringz reaches #4 on Billboard. At #1 is the 'Akiba-kei' electropop zeitgeist of Perfume* - three seemingly average girls awkwardly declared the highest charting J-techno in history (a record last held by YMO). Japan falls into recession as culture industries wither across the vine. Footage appears of none other than Kamen Rider performing a popular viral dance. Trancecore, breakcore, speedcore, ravecore, J-core, et al. form a 180 BPM+ constellation. Rabid fans give birth to over 9000 remixes & interpolations of songs originally composed for a home-made "bullet-hell" PC game. Ronald Mcdonald gabba edits storm the net. Rockman 9 debuts but Airman remains undefeated. Anonymous subcultural belonging, brainswells of recognition, gasping for air, nice boat.

*worth mentioning svengali of the moment Yasutaka Nakata - something like Donna Summer, Kraftwerk, & Alan Braxe by way of DDR. Could also be described as the sugar to Ed Banger's sweat - same formula of savagely compressed rectangles of distorted bass except here tweaked w/ glitter & J-pop robo-ditties. Trackier material tends to be better (i.e. unbound by the strictures of idol-mastery as w/ his own group Capsule) since the ostensible pop hooks mostly hang like deadweight, 'anthemic' in bludgeon but rather variable for memorability or catchiness. Intermittently dazzling will have to do for now.