| #676 |
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2003 |
Perilous 676 One of the best things about Sound Summit is the amount of new music that gets traded, passed around and played in Newcastle over the three days. Some of the loot collected this year included yet another new album from Canberra’s Darren Zeising. Darren’s last release came out a mere three months ago under the pseudonym of Liife – an experimental IDM project full of metallic and glitched beats and odd noises. For his most recent release he has returned to the guise of Stalker. This second Stalker album is simply titled Empire and appears on his self-released Geometric imprint. Much in the vein of Chain Reaction, Deepchord, Empire is all warm electronic dub techno with spacious production and as a genre piece the whole record is excellent, but plays strictly by the rulebook. From Perth, but released through A Touch Of Class, Dave Miller has done two remixes for Akufen. Whilst the original track Who Carez is typical sample skipping Akufen-house fare, Dave Miller’s first mix goes for a hip hop/broken beat approach which is the pick of the bunch, while his second mix is more standard 4/4 action. Miller’s work seems to be shifting closer to broken beat and jazz territory probably as a result of his expanding musical tastes and his work with a lot of live players in Perth including Domenico Di Clario. His album is in the middle of recording and should be something to watch when it gets a release. Closer to home, former Sydney-sider, 8-Bit is getting closer to releasing his long awaited pop/r&b project, The Calculators. The album sampler was doing the rounds at Sound Summit and the finishing touches are being put on the record which will come out sometime in early 2004. The sampler hints at a project that marries 8-Bit’s supertight electro production with slightly androgynous pop vocals. The six tracks on the album sampler carry strong influences from both 2 step, current r&b, and an early 80s elecropop sound of New Order etc. For those expecting a more techno record it will be a shock, but as a pop record it is already sounding excellent. This year Sound Summit ran a demo panel where a group of industry people, including myself, listened and gave feedback to a series of anonymously submitted demos. These demos ranged from industrial noise to standard pop/rock but most fell somewhere in-between downtempo electronics and drum & bass. Certainly there were plenty of excellent works-in-progress and especially the feedback on production value, vocal recording, and EQing given by Chris Chetland would have been invaluable to most people in the session. Overall, Sound Summit was perhaps the best one yet – and its condensed format managed to cram each session with substantial knowledge and value. Yellow Peril (www.snarl.org)  Goto
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