Review: Sasha's Invol2ver

Wow. It's not often I put on my headphones at work and find myself really wanting to listen to something in a serious way, but Sasha's Invol2ver isn't just any DJ mix. After so many disappointments recently, where the mix seemed, at best, an exercise in Ableton, Sasha has put out a deep, engaging reminder of what a truly talented producer can accomplish.

In many ways I'm reminded of the classic Northern Exposure, but there are more vocals samples here, and straight up rock moments, and while Northern Exposure offered the listener a vast space in which to lose themselves, Invol2ver, perhaps true to its name, comes off as a more plaintive, anxious, and personal statement. This makes it difficult, at times, to think of this as a dance mix; there are moments when I can imagine the lights and the crowd, the rush of exhilaration, but as it slowly unwinds toward the end I find myself meditating on what this final statement of "the one thing I've yet to find/has found me" means. But then, this is an mix that brings in two of the most angst-ridden tracks in contemporary music, Apparat's "Arcadia" and Thom Yorke's "Eraser."

I've always liked Sasha's sound; where others go for the easy anthem, he treads lightly, kicking in a sharp bass beat to propel things along but maintaining a sense of space and expansion. Sasha's scale is symphonic, and he has a real composer's sense of texture and arrangement. After hearing so much over-compressed bloghousery lately, where it's all amount the most bang for your buck, Sasha's sound is a breath of fresh air.

Record Review: The In-Kraut, Vol. 2

Anybody who likes to mouth the usual cliches about Germans only making cold, calculated, soulless electronic music should run down to Open Mind Records on Market Street and pick up a copy of "The In-Kraut: Hip Shaking Grooves made in Germany 1967-74, Vol.2" on Marina Records. It's twenty tracks of "beat, new sound, soul and soundtrack nuggets" that could slide right into any super-groovy lounge set next to Serge Gainsborough. There's lots of swing, crazy horn arrangements, Hammond B-3 freak-outs, and smooth vocals (in English and German), all recorded live with jazz orchestras like Charly Antolini's Power Dozen. There's even a super-rare single from German proggers Can! from when they were known as Inner Space, and an appearance from a star of German kids' TV, the bunny sock puppet Hase Caesar, who used to introduce the jugend to the latest beats on his show Schlagen fuer Schlappohren (Hits for Loppy Ears).

The stand out English vocal track for me is "Swinging London," by Hazy Osterwald Jet Set, which could be used in the opening titles for the next Austin Powers movie, while in German I'm very partial to "Wildkatze" by Christer Baldin, which was a soundtrack for a movie of the same name. My all-time fave, though, is Hildegard Knef's "Holiday Time;" imagine Nico speak-singing about the ennui of holiday time, bored jet-set children throwing rocks at little girls, hostages being killed in Munich bank robberies, stagnation, inflation, "yes yes, I know you know." A little something to remind us that behind all the groovyness, the Wall was still up, the Beider-Meinhoff gang was on the loose, and only a couple years earlier student riots had almost brought about the collapse of governments throughout Western Europe. No wonder all these cats are so crazy.

Record Review: Justus Koehncke's "Parage:" Did Somebody Say Neue Disco?

Wandering around Valencia Street this evening I poked my head into Aquarius Records and picked up a a couple new 12s", including Feuerland by Justus Koehncke. The title track is actually a re-working of a track by Michael Rother of the krautrock band Neu!, and it's a pretty moody bit of, well, krautrock, but thinned out and sharpened up a bit by modern production techniques, with a more distinct beat and a nice bit of high-hat shuffle toward the end. The B-side, though, is Parage (think "Paradise Garage") by Koehncke. If I could point out any one track that I've heard in recent months that epitomizes neue disco, it's this. It's got those latin beats and conga sounds, a classic walking bass line, it's even got strings, but there's a fair amount of synthesizer atmosphere laid in as well, so you could imagine this tucked up nicely against a classic disco b-side but definitely showing that it's of a newer vintage. It's also bright and clean, with a fresh burble to the keyboards and a shine on the highs that you could never capture with 70s recording technology and production. It's so good I'm wondering when I can play it out, so for all you old-school disco heads, this is definitely something you should check out.

Check out Koehncke's video for Feuerland on Youtube:

CD Review: "Sweet and Vicious Remixes" by Luxxury

If, like me, you spent most of the late 90s hanging out in industrial clubs, going to Depeche Mode tribute parties, getting all swoony over Groovy Man of the The Thrill Kill Kult, and pondering the intersection of industrial and techno, there is much in the "Sweet and Vicious" remixes from local kids Luxxury (Baron von Luxxury and Johnatron) that you will find both familiar and appealing.

Though "Sweet and Vicious" is the main star of these remixes, the album also contains remixes of "Drunk," "Sex with Rich People," "Understood" and "Rock and Roll is Evil." The titles alone should tell you something; at the heart of all these tracks is the same dark, sexy synthpop sound that drove the glam side of goth into its eventual electro evolution. Of the "Sweet and Vicious" remixes my favorite has to be "All Night Dance Party's More Vicious Than Sweet" version. Big chunky bass thumps with classic acid house handclaps and highhats, crazy phased vocals, ah, I can see the lights sweeping the sweating masses now. Second place would have to go to the "Exxpensive Re-edit," a classic piece of synthpop that puts the vocals right up front and would go lovely with side of Depeche Mode or Wolfsheim. Of the other tracks I really dug the dirty electro sound of "Rock and Roll is Evil (Devin Dirt's Fat Elvis Remix)" and "Drunk (Lovesick Vocoders at Night Remix)," which sounds like something I would have encountered on the dance floor of Berlin's Duncker when the DJ was headed into his harder industrial moments. All in all a great set of tracks for those nights when you want to put on your eyeliner and go play with the disco vampires.

Since Luxxury is a local phenom you have plenty of chances to catch them in both live and DJ incarnations. This Friday at Lights Down Low they'll be having a CD release party, featuring DJ sets by some of their remixers and a live performance ("Two men, two synths, one bass guitar, one vocoder and one talkbox…come smell the magic!"), and every fourth Thursday (that's tonight, kids) Baron von Luxxury and guests set your heart pumping with Disco Workout at Le Duplex (and did I mention the free cupcakes?). And these kids just keep on giving - check out their blog, discoworkout.com for daily MP3s of their favorite artists. And don't miss their YouTube video for "Sweet and Vicious," in which they save London from a LOLcat. Whew, so much productivity!

Now if I could just hook Baron von Luxxury up with Lord Kook . . . .

CD Review: NIN's "Year Zero" from the NY Times

Ah Trent, Trent, Trent. In the 90s I thought you were oh-so-hot, and now you look like Henry Rollins. Bleah. Feel kinda the same way about the music. I first heard NIN open for The Jesus and Mary Chain at a dumpy club in Charlottesville VA. I didn't know who Nine Inch Nails were, but when I heard "Head Like a Hole" coming from the stage area I had to leave the bar and see what was up. I moshed through the rest of the set and bought the album the next day. After The Downward Spiral I really stopped paying attention to NIN, as I had other things to occupy me. With this new album it seems like Trent is trying to recapture some of the dark, paranoid, technological dystopia that was all the rage in the 90s and fueled the nascent Industrial movement, but now seems positively nostalgic - oh honey, remember when we were worried about militias and the New World Order? That's pretty much the thrust of this New York Times review and I'm with them all the way.

CD Review: "The Meaning of 8" by Cloud Cult

The essence of being jaded is that you don’t feel anything, nothing moves you; everything can be reduced to prior experience, dismissed as repetition and recycling, been there, done that, got the penicillin shot. What’s left is the pursuit of novelty for novelty’s sake, the admiration of technical perfection, and the feeling of disappointment that there’s nothing that that can stir the embers of your emotions. Which makes it all that more remarkable when an album like Cargo Cult’s The Meaning of 8 comes along and you find yourself making excuses about allergies and new glasses to explain the tears in your eyes to your workmates.

I first heard of Cloud Cult through their single "Transistor Radio" on a KEXP stream, a song about the voice of a boy’s grandfather coming to him through said electronic device and urging him into the world. It’s a track that can bring complete introspective silence to a room full of people listening to it, and each of them, at the end of three minutes, will be a little more misty-eyed. All of Cargo Cult’s songs deal with the big mysteries, life, death, love, being-in-the world despite the absurdity all around us. Songwriter Craig Minowa comes to these questions honestly, having lost his two-year old son to sudden death, separating from his wife as a result, and then spending the next year on his ramshackle organic farm where he wrote a hundred songs in an attempt to staunch his grief. When he sings a lyric like”You can take it in stride, or you can take it right between the eyes./Suck up, suck up and take your medicine./It’s a good day, it’s a good day, to face the hard things” you know that it’s coming from really knowing what “hard things” are.

Much of the power behind Cloud Cult is Minowa’s voice. Comparisons to Conor Oberst come easily, but I hear a bit of Bono’s gospel howl in it as well. It’s a voice that sounds younger than Minowa’s years, but perhaps that is only a function of the vulnerability that it conveys. That the rest of the instruments include cello, keyboards, bass, trumpet, and drums enables the band to create amazingly complex arrangements that veer back and forth between basic vocal harmony and strummed guitar to full-on electronic squonk. In songs like “Pretty Voice” and “Take Your Medicine” the band is able to move between acoustic and electronic passages on a thin dime, creating anthemic builds and then releasing into clean, sharp moments that, indeed, hit you right between the eyes.

The album is an extended song cycle that runs a good 80 minutes, though it’s definitely front-loaded with the tracks that are destined to be the big singles (I'm particularly partial to "When Chemicals Collide"). There are hooks in here that will run through you head almost hypnotically after you hear them, and with them will come the feeling that they have changed you in a subtle way. Perhaps you will be inspired to find a way to make you day into gold.

Cloud Cult will be performing at Bottom of the Hill on May 3. I imagine it will be an extremely powerful show, with songs like this that beg for a crowd to sing along with them. I’ve already got my tickets, you should get yours as well.

The Pitchfok Media Review of "The Meaning of 8" by Cloud Cult

CD Review: Alex Smoke, Sci.Fi.Hi.Fi Vol. 3

It's rare to find a mix CD that can really deliver an experience to the listener - most of the time what you get is a collection of tracks that, at best, are artfully sewn together but lack any intellectual or emotional cohesion. The result is something you can put on for background at your party, with an occasional track that might catch your attention, but rarely will you feel compelled to just sit there and listen. Volume 3 of the Sci.Fi.Hi.Fi series by Alex Smoke, however, is that rare collection that is capable of leading the listener along through seventy plus minutes of diverse sound that, at its conclusion, makes you feel that you have really have gone somewhere.

Deep house fans will hear much that is familiar in the tracks Smoke has selected for his mix, from the deep heartbeat bass and langourous organ chords in Model 500's "M69 Starlight" to the oscillating background waves of "Minor Explosions" from Stewart Walker Vs. Theorem. The whole vibe of this mix is very deep, and very house, though the minimal aesthetic governs everything; the tracks are complex and poly-rhythmic, but each track element has its own distinctive position and value. There's lots of space in these tracks, and it's this space that makes for such a compelling listening experience because it provides an opportunity for the listener to insert their own own mind and follow along. This can be in the form of intellectual amazement at the polyrhythms and interactions among the track elements, or emotional enjoyment of the vistas that begin to appear in the mind's eye. About halfway through, when Smoke brings in "Detroit: One Circle" by The Vision, the tempo picks up and the high-hats and hand claps evoke old-school acid house before taking us over into more abstract territory with "Xenia" by Thomas Brinkmann, easily the kookiest and most-good natured track on this compilation (with the hysterical "25 Bitches (Gaiser Remix)" by Troy Pierce a good second). Clara Intellecto brings in an electro bass line with "Peace of Mind," but this just provides feel-good downtempo setup for the most techno section of the mix, starting with "Juan and Alex" by Musica Charlista, moving through the glistening keyboard stabs and hip-hop inflected bassline of "Faktum" by Epy, and concluding with Smoke's own track "Pingu." "Pingu" sounds like it could have been put out on a minimal psytrance label like Traktor, with a slow build that then unwinds into a loping bassline punctuated by chopped and distorted vocal sounds. Smoke leads us out of this dark territory with "Squat" by Quixote and his own "Always and Forever," giving us a triumphant build into "Fokuz" by 2000 and One, another track that evokes the old days of rave with its acid lines, steady bass pulse, and chatter of high-hats.

The mixing of all this is flawless, with long mixes, the use of quick snippets (as in the beginning, where we move through three tracks in under six minutes), and the ability to borrow elements from one track to use in another. I suspect that this mix was assembled using Ableton or Traktor, but the mechanics of it all inconsequential in consideration of the art that is produced.

Sci.Fi.Hi.Fi Volume 3 from Alex Smoke gets the two rolling boys' thumb's up. No matter where your head is at, it will be someplace different by the time you finish listening to this mix, and chances are, it will be a happier, more satisfied place than where you started from.

CD Review: Triple R - Friends mix

Sometimes the jaded DJ is a bit late to the game, as is the case here with the Friends mix from Richard Riley Reinhold, originally released on Kompakt in 2002. According to a review on Dusted, Reinhold, founder of the Traum and Trapez labels, two essential labels for the minimal movement, asked twelve of his buddies to contribute tracks for this mix. With buddies like Michael Mayer and Luciano, you can't help but put together something that is at least decent.

The mix starts off in dreamy territory with "Easy Woman (Rhobag Wruhme Mix)" by MetaboMan and "Gigolistic" by Dialogue. The metal-on-metal sounds and electronic buzz of the first track lets us know that we're in techno land, but the moment that the deep bass and languid female vocals kick in we also know that this is going to be a house groove. Gigolistic picks up a bit with a nice shuffle beat and crisp high-end snaps, but the bass stays fat and deep - you might bob your head to this, but it's not going to make you sweat on the dancefloor. This feel, with the addition of long, slow organ notes and some female vocals, continues through Ada's "Blindhouse." This track is the kind of easy-going lope you might expect from Ada, and the female vocals turn into a repeating motif of this mix - this is probably the most female vocal work that hasn't been chopped down into tiny phonemes that I've heard in a mix in a long while.

Gears shift slightly with Luciano and Lea's "Franky (Featuring Lea)." Lea sings in French against some very electro bass beats, and every now and then gives us a little giggle. She sounds like a petulant girl in a black dress with a cigarette, and if you dig that kind of thing, this is a great track. But Process' "Pelican (Oliver Hacke Remix)" coming right afterwards is definitely one of the stellar selections of this mix. That deep house bass disappears behind some highly tweaky, reversed, delayed, and generally chopped all-to-hell percussion that finally brings the energy out in this mix. There are some nice reverbed acid lines in here that remind me oh-so-slightly of chill psytrance, and which, for me, open up much more interesting vistas than dissolute French chicks. With "Boots and Pants" by Broker/Dealer we take off into space disco territory, with synth horn crescendos and a soaring vocal chorus, before coming back down into "Double Yum" by Jeff Samuel. This is a fun, kinda wacky techno track that restores some snap and motion to the mix after taking off into the heavens. "Byrthe" by Sami Koivikko is on the more serious side, with a much more insistent drive, but we can hear those space horns in here again, and while there's plenty of thrust, it doesn't feel like we really get anywhere, like it's just the bridge to bring us into "Kind of Prayer (Michael Mayer Remix)" by Pwog. Here the more traditional heartbeat house bass gets matched to a rapid, machinic high-hat that really dominates the song, keeping that depth there but not letting us drown in it. And then, halfway through, there are these distorted muted trumpet sounds and knarzy acid lines that remind us that, oh yeah, this is tech house.

Now, if it was up to me, this is where the mix would stop, because the last three tracks just don't make any sense. "Tanz Mit Mir (+Elodie)" by Schaeben Und Voss, while a fun track, is on a different map than the territory explored in the previous four tracks. The female vocal is back again, this time in German, speak-singing "Tanz mit Mir" over and over and over again, and not even on the beat. It's almost kinda kitschy, to be honest, and while it's got a deep, insistent bass thump, I can guarantee that this is the point where I would decide it was time for another drink.

And then comes "This is the Dream (of Evan and Chan) (Superpitcher Mix)". I like "This is the Dream (of Evan and Chan)" - I even have fond associations of it with my boyfriend. And I generally love everything by Superpitcher. But this chocolate does not go with this peanut butter, and this song certainly does not fit in with this mix. I'm sure RRR thought "Oh, hey, this is great, but where am I going to put it? I know, the end!" However, this is not the end. No, the end is Oxtongue's "Delight." Another lovely bit of electrotechnohouse, but again very vocal heavy, and far too light to work with what has preceded it.

The mixing of all this is very smooth and slick, and I wonder (as always) by what method it was put together - I do notice that at the end of "Oxtongue" you can hear the sound of a needle scratching against the label and a tone-arm being lifted before the mix ends. In listening back over it all, this is an interesting mix with some distinct moments, but I think it would be far better with the first three tracks, and the last two, gone. There's also not much here that's really exciting, or strikes me as being different from things I've heard before - but then, this mix *is* five years old. Perhaps when it first came out I would be more impressed, but it now seems more historical thant cutting-edge. Overall there's a sense of competence and discernment behind this mix, but it's more something I would put on while making dinner than something I would want to pawn off on my friends as the next cool thing I found.