Los Frutos Secos

This record, Muzika Electronic, is the fucking nuts, no two ways about it. A veritable compendium of squelchy, bleepy, clonking loveliness which presses so many of my buttons I feel like a drum machine. Frak, for it is they, have created the finest slab of electro-goo I've heard for ages, and Digitalis are to be congratulated not only for releasing it, but pressing it on the most lurid bright green vinyl I've ever clocked eyes on. I'm not even listening to it at the moment, but I'm almost bouncing in my seat just thinking about it. So what does this bugger sound like then?

Fucking brilliant is what. It's practically everything I love about dance music all rolled up into one exceedingly toothsome cake of fun. Take some proper acid house, stir in a big lump of Detroit techno and a soupçon of new beat, add a dash of Blue Monday/Video 586 style New Order, whizz in a blender with some euro minimal synth stylings and some Krautrocky playfulness, and garnish liberally with Radiophonic sprinkles. And, this is one of the most perfectly cut, beautiful sounding records I've heard in a fucking long time. And it's very, very green indeed. Buy, beg, borrow or steal a copy if you've got a dancing bone in yr body, I guarantee you'll fucking love it. I'd write more but I need to listen to it again. And probably dance like a tit.

Go listen immediately

La Vuelta De Hombre Plástico

Polyrhythmic acid* techno clusterfuck is the term that springs to mind when listening to the title cut of Richie Hawtin's latest Plastikman 12", Slinky (m_nus). Which, if yr inclinations lean even remotely in the same directions as mine, is a description which should have you at least slavering, if not in a state of total arousal. This is most definitely not the more introspective Plastikman of Consumed or Closer. Oh no, because as you can see, this has a white cover, the old stretchy geezer on the cover and the wibbly red and black lettering of his earlier, more lysergically inclined slabs of plastik, and that sort of cover on a Plastikman record promises one thing. Squelch. And fuck me does it deliver. The 303s on this record are just sopping. Protracted dripping sawtooth ooze liberally slathered (all in completely different time signatures) over the best goddam drum programming I've heard in a fair while, rhythm and leads entwining and disentangling simultaneously like evolving organic knotwork, nothing staying still, hats and snares and 303s slipping and sliding round the loping flickering groove the whole thing pivots on. It's essentially the sound of machines fucking, and by far my favourite fucking track of 2010.

The b-side's pretty good too.

And that's about as close to a 2010 music roundup y're going to get from me.

*House, in this case. Although...

Movimiento

As you know, I do love my techno. And I may have mentioned before how fond I am of the work of Marc Houle, which is to say very. The man is a fucking genius, whether as part of Run, Stop, Restore* or solo, there's a level of after-hours funk to anything the motherfucker touches that I just don't get from anyone else in the glorious world of techno. No one else can take the classic Detroit template, strip it down this far, and come up with something that just fucking moves like this. And when I say this, I mean his latest LP, Drift (m_nus). It's simply amazing.

Just fantastic. Pure Detroit minimal, but even less so, yet so much more. Sometimes all you have is a kick and bassline, evolving almost imperceptibly, with just a clap or a brief synth explosion every now and then, and not as relief as you might expect, but exactly the opposite, filtered and eq'd in such a way as to build the tension instead of relieving it, often allied to a slow burning drone or a sparse treated and repeated vocal reinforcing what's already there as opposed to complementing or completing it and making yr brain and body just wind up that little bit more before those hi-hats spin up to speed and the fucker just drops and you have no choice but to fucking move.

Any record whose synthesizers sometimes put me in mind of Reproduction-era Human League**, contains guitar playing that veers from Elektro Guzzi meets early Prince choppy funk to blatantly ripping off The Sisters Of Mercy circa Kiss The Carpet*** whilst mainlining that four on the floor staccato groove that I crave so badly, all helicopter hi-hats and kicks and bass slung so low they're actually fucking underground, ever accelerating down that mythical nighttime highway Juan Atkins discovered all those years ago is alright by me. To put it mildly.

Watch this:



*with Troy Pierce and Magda. It's exactly as good as that sounds. Possibly even fucking better. Both of their EPs are absolutely essential.

**Who penned two of the greatest lyrics in the English language:

"Dehumanization is such a big word,
 It's been around since Richard the third" (from Blind Youth)

and,

"With concentration, my size increased" (Empire State Human)

If you don't own a copy of Reproduction, I suggest you rectify that situation as quickly as possible. It's fucking ace. The reissue includes The Dignity Of Labour EP, where for two and a half glorious minutes the League seem to be in telepathic communion with Cluster, and it has the 7" version of Being Boiled, the greatest anti-silkworm farming piece of electronic music ever.

***Two things. Early Sisters Of Mercy fucking rules.  And why am I seemingly the only person who heard that title, and the song itself, whose first thought was "ah, a song about an unpleasant cunnilingual experience". I mean for fucks sake, the chorus contains the line "Next time I'll look before I kiss the carpet". Which is sage advice indeed... I guess this is why I never became a goth. No sense of fun some people.

El Nuevo Modelo Quinientos

Oh yes. Pass the cleaning equipment, because I may need it quite soon. Juan Atkins, Living God King Of Detroit Techno, is putting out the first new Model 500 ep for 11 years on this coming Monday, and I'm slightly overexcited*, because the one track I've heard from it is a rather fine slice of electrocharged loveliness, because I fucking love Model 500, and almost all of my favourite Juan Atkins tunes have slid out under that particular moniker. Anyway, the reason I'm posting this, is that you should go here, and listen to the glistening marvellousness that is "Huesca".

*Yeah, like this is some new phenomenon concerning me and music.

Cuatro En El Planto

God damn I fucking love this record, the first LP by the downright extraordinary Austrian trio Elektro Guzzi (Macro Records). Seriously, I am in awe of this record, and I really don't say that very often. Elektro Guzzi have done something I've always wanted to do. They've made one of the finest techno albums I've ever fucking heard, using nothing but bass, guitar and drums. No synthesizers*, no samples, no sequencers, no drum machines, no overdubs. And no attempt to disguise the nature of the instrumentation, the drums sound like drums, not a drum machine, you know y're listening to three people playing live, not something pieced together on a sequencer grid. Don't think for a second this makes EG's music any less precise than if it was created using the traditional, electronic methods, this isn't a band, it's a fucking organic machine, a twelve limbed group mind with a metronomic drive that makes Can sound sloppy.

They'd been together for 5 years before making a single recording, (a 10" on Macro with, as on the album, Patrick Pulsinger co-producing and running the desk), and you can tell as soon as you hear the opening track "Hexenschuss" that they probably didn't get out much in those 5 years, so finely honed is the telepathy between these three musicians, a slowly evolving filtered bass riff and astounding straight down the line four on the floor drumming pushing the track ever forward, as the cymbals skip just like they should around the beautiful, chiming, clanging guitar stabs and swipes and it just builds, almost like the Necks at high speed, squelching bass and spiralling echoes rising in intensity and frequency and five minutes later it's over. Far too soon. You want more, you are now completely hooked on Elektro Guzzi.

I am anyway, hopelessly addicted. Any band that can take two of my favourite, and seemingly diametrically opposed, things in music, the simplicity and flexibility of the improvising power trio and the machine funk precision of proper fucking techno and marry them in such an utterly convincing manner, to produce something this taut, this composed, this arresting, is worthy of my love and my money**. I love the fact that there's no attempt to make the bass or the guitar sound more synthy, bass guitars have a very different kind of low end spank than synths do, the initial attack of finger or pick on string can produce a real gutpunch in a way that synths find hard to match, no matter how low they go, a synth can massage yr liver, but a bass guitar can kick a hole in it, and there's no mistaking Jakob Schneidewind's bass sound on this album, no matter how filtered or fuzzed it is, for a synthesizer. It drives the music forward in a very different way than a synth would, even playing exactly the same line, because that very physical part of how the sound is produced is readily apparent on this record, you can hear the fingers, the string, the impetus, in a way no synth can ever quite seem to emulate convincingly and, along with Bernhard Breuer's jaw dropping drumming***, it gives the music a distinct physical presence that's very unusual in a traditionally electronic genre .

Bernhard Hammer's guitar though, is what really surprised me, no riffs as such, no melodies as such, it often functions more like tuned percussion, soft, almost Sonic Youth like bell chimes, gamelan and steel pans in a hall of mirrors, pops and cracks and whirring machinery, bowed harmonics swelling like clouds growing and the sound of rulers pinged on desks, there's more so-called extended technique on display here than on the last 400 fucking free improv records I've heard, and all of it far more convincingly utilised. When he finally does play something vaguely "normal guitar" like on "Franz", the LP's final track, it's an almost shocking moment because you've spent the last hour immersed in this glowing, shifting rhythmic landscape you've almost forgotten y're listening to a trio playing live and it's jolting, the most traditional guitar sound on the record becomes one of the oddest. Very few musicians can pull that off, to take a listener so far from their traditional expectations of an instruments role, that the sudden reversion to type makes yr brain double take, a perceptual backflip which makes everything seem upside down.

Fuck it, what else can I say? Well, getting Patrick Pulsinger to mix the fucker was a masterstroke as well, the album sounds fucking fantastic, somehow warm and sparkly, and most definitely live. Just go to their myspace and watch the videos, download the live set on Resident Advisor, a single 47 minute beast of a live set, buy the album, and come join me in my new habit.

As Nice Pete would say,"good music, well played by men"§.

*Like it used to say on Queen LPs.

**And my bad pilled-up dancing.

***Seriously, the man is un-fucking-believable, like a funky orrery.

§From Achewood, the brilliant cartoon strip by Chris Onstad, which gave the world my favourite fake book title ever: Deconstructing Hawkwind Mythology.

Tómelo Lento

When it comes to electronic music, much as I adore the abstracted kosmische wibbling of Cluster et al, joyfully prostrate myself before the synthetique altar of Lard Free, Heldon, Spacecraft and other French loons and revel in the clanking otherness of British electronic music from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop through Cabaret Voltaire/TG etc and up to the early days of Acid, nothing electronic quite floats my boat like good fucking Techno.

Now I know Techno is somewhat of a broad church, so I'd better define my terms before the trainspotters come out of their mushroom-scented dens and berate me for not toeing their particular party line. So if you disregard anything where the kick sounds like a distorted rubber ball bouncing off a hollow wall at over 145bpm, mindless euro-gabba shit, anything that smacks of hardcore and sounds like a fucking hoover*, y're getting there. Think Juan and Derrick, Blake Baxter and Eddie Fowlkes. Think m_nus and Perlon. Think Basic Channel and Modern Love and Warp** when it was still a label with a heart, think Tim Wright and Christian Vogel and the funkier end of Tresor. Got it?

I like it funky, I like it subtle and I like it beautiful. I don't mind fast, but it's impossible to make a drum machine groove once you go over a certain speed, witness the artistic dead-end that drum and bass fell into, eventually it had to slow down and mutate into something entirely different to progress. I don't mind hard, but not when that's all it is, unless y're Richie Hawtin or Surgeon, it's extremely difficult to give a gatling gun snare and jackhammer kick any groove whatsoever***.

I am rambling, I know, but there is a point. And it's this. My old mate Ergin, no mean DJ and musician himself, has started a site dedicated to the slower end of our beloved Techno, showcasing tracks new and old, from forgotten (should-be) classics by the likes of Carl Craig and Robert Hood to more obscure beauties that slipped under the radar (there's a killer Purveyors Of Fine Funk tune on there) and recent stuff that you should be listening to. It's a new site, so give it a while to get more content up, but what's there already is mighty fine, so get yrselves over to Slow Techno and enjoy.

*Didn't like it then, really hate it now. Grooveless, joyless shit.

**Don't get me wrong, they still release some glorious records, like Cosmogramma by Flying Lotus, and especially the latest Autechre LP, Oversteps, which is a flat-out masterpiece, but for every piece of electronic wonderment they put out, there's a fucking Maximo Park (why do this band exist?) or Battles§ tipping the goodness scales in the wrong direction. Warp used to have a label identity as strong as Blue Note or (early) Impulse!, but now they're just another big anonymous label and it's a damn shame.

***If I want velocity and heaviness I'll head for the grindcore section of my collection. This is supposed to be dance music, not an exercise in endurance, and if it ain't funky it fails. Mind you, there are very few things that are as funny as watching pilled-up twats trying to dance to really fast D&B or techno, so I suppose it does have some function.

§I know, lots of you like Battles, and while I admit they're a much better band than the aforementioned Maximo Park (not that that's particularly tricky), I can think of much better ways to spend my time than listening to a mechanized Yes featuring guest vocals by Alvin & The Chipmunks.