| #644 |
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2003 |
Perilous 644 British satirist and troublemaker Chris Morris has returned from a quiet period with a BAFTA winning short film for Warp’s new film offshoot. With a name that could be mistaken for an Autechre track, My Wrongs #8245-8249 & 117, is the story of a man mentally dominated by Rothko the dog he is minding for a friend. Clocking in at around fifteen minutes, Warp has released it as a single-priced DVD packaged like a classic hardcover mid-size children’s book and has included a suitably deadpan ‘additional commentary’ and a ‘remix’ by Osymyso and Cartel Communique. The film is derived from a sketch that appeared as part of the Blue Jam radio series and is suitably dark and unsettling and vintage Morris. Keep an eye out for Morris’ excellent Brasseye TV series from the late 90s that, rumour has it, SBS has (at last) been touting for. The full seven episodes of Brasseye appeared on DVD last year and Morris’ entire Blue Jam TV adaptations will be released as a double DVD in early April. Morris is also behind the two George Bush cutups entitled Bushwacked and Cartel Communique have also put out a video ‘remix’ of this, all of which you can download from the Warp website. Its been a very long time since I’ve written anything about drum & bass. This has been partially because there hasn’t been much exciting going on. Despite a resurgence in the number of releases over the last year or two, helped by the summery pop drum & bass of Marky and the Brazilian scene, and a decline in garage there has been very little worth mentioning. Beyond the never ending stream of generic Good Looking releases and the Brazilian stuff, there has been a return to old skool sounds and tracks as seems to happen every couple of years. This year, though, it seems a bit different with a healthy return to whitelabel bootleg remixes (mostly r&b and hip hop tracks like Zinc’s excellent one-sided jump up version of Mobb Deep’s Shook Ones) and some excellent ‘flashback’ tracks. On Eastside is a tasty track from Break called Sticky Situation which blends rolling amens with samples from We Are E with and a rising ’93 style bass. On the other side of the old skool revival, Total Science, who have been working this route for a few years now bring out another budget-priced collection of tracks under the Audio Works title. Volume 3 collects the last few and the next few vinyl releases from Total Science on CIA onto the one compile and is an easy way to hear where they are at in between their countless remixes – again, in retro mode, taking on Hyper On Experience’s classic Lord Of The Null Lines (incidentally the best remix still, nearly 10 years later, is the Foul Play mix). At Frigid over the next couple, Sir Robbo returns from two months in the UK with a swag of fresh tunes and will be debuting some on the 9th, then on the 16th, toy fetishists Toy Death. After that Tim Koch pops up from Adelaide on the 23rd to launch his remix album – remixes of him on Aural Industries, not the remixes by him which appeared recently on n5md. Hopefully in coming months we’ll have visits from Safety Scissors and Sutekh and later in the year Sound Summit is back (October 3-5). And, if you are dropping by a record store, pick up a copy of the new Cyclic Defrost. Yellow Peril (www.snarl.org)  Goto
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