| #556 |
|
2001 |
Perilous 556 All things old are new again . . . but I’m sure we’ve been here before. Crippled Dick Hot Wax, renowned for their excellent reissues, in particular the Vampyros Lesbos soundtrack, are back with a new range of nostalgia. Part lounge muzak and part rare groove, its just like it was in those elitist old days. I guess now that everything has been successfully plundered, sampled, remixed, and spat out again across the pop mainstream and the connoisseur-ist underground, that mining the vaults of so-called ‘library music’ and old commercials isn’t so surprising. DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist did it successfully with their Brainfreeze bootleg (itself the subject of a recent reissue), and now Crippled trot out their Popshopping compilation, and now, the obligatory remix disc. Now I’m not denying that there are some entertaining moments on Popshopping but take this idea twenty or thirty years down the track and consider what this means for the ads on TV now, for kids in 2030. As for the remixes, they are nowhere near as good as mixes done for Vampyros Lesbos, partially due to the source material being already too dense and full of sounds for easy remixing. The best of the slim seven mixes is the glitchy cut up of the Ford Scampi advert by Mimok . . . maybe its symptomatic of a music scene without direction other than backwards? More exciting are two new releases on Tony Morley’s Leaf label. Where Leaf had a patchy few early releases, the label has settled into a solid groove in the last two years. The licensing of Susumu Yokota’s superb ambient work from Yokota’s own Japanese label Skintone, has led Leaf from strength to strength and the latest Yokota release Grinning Cat is another gem. More unsettling than the lush Sakura, Grinning Cat replaces the sweeping Eno-esque sounds of Sakura for snatches of sound, tiny piano loops, and several beats which betray Yokota’s other guises. Also new on Leaf is the next album from 310. A duo of producers from America, 310 usually produce music for hip hop and pop acts – A Tribe Called Quest and Britney Spears – serious! But the 310 project works by sending tapes back and forth between each other and reassembling them in their two respective studios. Like the cover photography for their albums, 310 draw together urban sound sources much like Godspeed You Black Emperor and layer them over tricky studio beats. Their sound engineering backgrounds bring out a sharp degree of sound texture – sampled guitars sparkle as if you can hear each string vibrate, hi-hats shimmer – the effect is quite spectacular. Like Herbert’s recent Bodily Functions album the sonic detail is best appreciated on headphones. Frigid has electro-pop pianist MeLee joined by Phil Smart over the long weekend Sunday on the 9th, then its Reference Point and the one behind the Chutney parties, Purple Haze. The tickets for our fifth birthday special with Squarepusher are out in the shops now and are also available from Frigid directly. www.snarl.org for details. Yellow Peril  Goto
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