Category: the crate

Regards (Alku) is fourteen brief tracks on a 3″ CDR, each track constructed from myriad little samples. Wobbly consistently plays off odd contrasts, like a smattering of looped laughter that follows a CD-skipping segment, only to be joined by a lockstep drum beat. Despite the collagist style, these pieces all maintain the sort of pop sensibility — beats that make you smile, sounds that stick in your head — that distinguished Matmos’s music from the start. The short track “old dirty” is rapidfire snippets, assumedly lifted from rapper Old Dirty Bastard, whereas “Glad Ledley” is awash chopstick and typewriter percussion and watery sound effects. All in all, an admirable balance of goofy and smart.

Despite its listing, on the Warp Records web site, as a “promo,” Drukqs 2 Track Promo is in fact a proper, commercially available advance listen to the forthcoming Aphex Twin full-length, titled Drukqs, distributed by London/Sire in the United States and due for release on Oct. 23. It comes as both a 12″ and a CD single, both featuring two songs from the album: “54 Cymru Beats,” listed as the “Argonaut Remix,” and “Cock 10,” listed as the “Delco Freedom Mix.” Apparently the versions of these two songs on the album will be the “non-mix” originals. Both heard here are mad, hard-hitting, deeply randomized affairs, “Delco” favoring slightly less distorted sounds than does “Cymru.” They switch gears like a kid with a freshly minted driver’s permit, careening from moments of elegance to raucous data overload.

Chef Menteur‘s “Shotgun”: Slodgy, droney head music heard through water-logged ears. At chefmenteur.org.

“An Early Walk to the Busstation” by triPhaze: Pardon the pun, but there’s nothing pedestrian about this hallucinogenic concoction of wavering tones (MP3).

Jetone is a Montreal-based musician whose parents know him as Tim Hecker. Ultramarin (Force Inc.) is 12 tracks of cyclopean metrical consistency, dependable as a Timex but considerably more intense. Slight variations in tone are the result of either painstaking effort on Hecker’s part, or your brain’s attempt to make peace with the existential dread. Either way, this is a bracing listening experience, Information Age music that seems to still be caught up in the anxieties of the Industrial Revolution. The track “Octan” layers arrhythmic static atop the perambulating beats, which leaves the listener wondering which is more threatening: routine or divergence from the routine. “Phoedra II” opens with what sounds like an exasperatingly minute guitar riff — exasperating precisely because the tension, small as it is, never releases. Like much Force Inc. music, a lot of Jetone’s work is techno heard from a distance, retaining all of the throb and none of the sheen. But other tracks, like “Only Then,” with its suffocating ambience, refute such careless categorization. Highly recommended.