Category: the crate

DSP Holiday is an aural photo album from a true busman’s holiday: three accomplished electronic musicians holed up together in hotels and studios, doing collaboratively that which they generally do individually and professionally, at home, on their lonesome. HAT (to whom the album is attributed) consists of three men: the H is for Haruomi “Harry” Hosono (veteran of Yellow Magic Orchestra, and an early pop-electronic figure), the A is Atom Heart (born Uwe Schmidt, and so prolific that he maintains an LP crate just for his collection of pseudonyms) and the T is Testu Inoue (an accomplished synthesist and microsounder in his own right). Honoso originally released this seven-track album on his Daisyworld Discs label in the late ’90s, and now Otodisc has re-released it for wider consumption.

The holiday theme apparently inspired the trio, because the record is a collection of off-world cha-chas (“Shinjyuku Photoshop”) and retro-futurist garden-party tunes. A track like “Digidelic” may start off with a fuzzy mash of crossed circuits, but eventually someone flips a switch and a dance beat kicks in, stumbling to remain upright. You can almost here a voice cry, “Hey, who spilled their Mai Tai in my iBook?” but it’s all in good fun. “Malihini Mele” similarly starts in a gray zone, all buzz — but the static soon reveals itself to be nothing other than surf, and then a ukulele (yes, a ukulele) comes into focus. As if embarrassed by their mutual enjoyment, HAT felt it necessary to tag a few minutes of hyper-delicate microsonics onto the end of “Mele,” perhaps to prove to their accountants that they were actually working. But if you hold this jewel box up to your ear, you’ll hear the surf, too.

This album review appeared, in slightly different form, in the autumn 2003 issue of e|i magazine.

EU are the somewhat funky side of globalism: two Russian musicians — Ilya Baramiya and Sasha Zaitsev (or Baramia and Zaicev, depending on your transliterator) — with a trunk full of hip-hop and prog rock, and a contract with a record label in Bristol, England (Pause 2). The opening cut on Warm Math, the duo’s second full-length album, opens with the appropriately titled “Retro”: five minutes of the truly old-school — not the lo-fi constructions of early Def Jam hip-hop, but gooey, slow-jam grooves that would have made sense with an R&B team like DeBarge emoting on top. The song’s thick, glossy synth lines won’t sit comfortably with everyone. They may signal down-low, all foreboding and street-wise, but they actually sound more Jolly Rancher than they do DJ Premier, more polished than seasoned. “Gerp” has that slightly goofy quality, exactly what made the X-Files theme song, for all its pop dread, sound like something that director Dario Argento would have used in a horror film back before Ronald Reagan had ever uttered the term “Evil Empire.”

It’s highly unlikely any of this is intended to be campy, even the sci-fi psychedelia of “Said.” The frequent keyboard solos are often mawkish, and the occasional attempts at rhythmic variation are forced (just listen to gears shifting inelegantly through both “Secret Track” and “Eusday”). Perhaps there’s some comfort to be taken in Warm Math; after all the feverish energy of glitch music — all those songs built, like dust mites, from little more than static — it’s nice to hear a sound as thick as your arm. Now, if the histrionics of a band like, say, Goblin (Dawn of the Dead, Profondo Rosso) are your thing, then EU will be a good excuse to get reacquainted with your local import record store.

This album review appeared, in slightly different form, in the autumn 2003 issue of e|i magazine.

Why is it that the most commonplace good-time pop-music elements — for example, a lilting electric-guitar melody and a cliché hip-hop drum loop — can combine to form something almost unbearably delectable? The musician Dim Dim (known to friends and family as Jerry Dimmer) specializes in exactly that sort of home-studio alchemy. And if “Riri,” the opening track to Kiwi (on the Audio Dregs label), is such a spectacular feat of Saturday-morning good cheer, it’s no surprise that the rest of the album can’t quite equal the initial sugar rush. “Riri” has a Carl Stalling goofiness, all “boing!” sound effects once it gets going, plus a consistent Don Ho, Hawaiian-vacation vibe. The song may appear to be mid-tempo, but it has a secret weapon in its feisty backbeat, which will have you attempting a conga line with the nearest carbon-based life form.

The album is packed with tracks that were built from the musical equivalent of Lego bricks: all the pieces are bright, shiny and interchangeable. “Fucha Fucha” has a kid singing along, nursery-rhyme style, with an occasional snippet of elementary scratching. “Flit” brings in more slack-key guitar, and recalls Kid Koala’s way with ambiguously paced vinyl recordings; it’s amazing what a little mechanized backbeat will do to refurbish an old 78. “Los Gitanos” echoes Amon Tobin’s Brazilian fusion escapades. Perhaps the one truly disappointing track on Kiwi comes midway through, in the form of “Frosty.” The song has all the telltale signs of drum’n’bass — dramatic downward modulation, the zippy back-and-forth percussion — but it’s too familiar to be fun. Perhaps Dim Dim’s point is that drum’n’bass is just another kind of party music, one element among many in his cartoony bag of tune tools, but oddly enough it’s the one element here he has not truly made his own.

This album review appeared, in slightly different form, in the autumn 2003 issue of e|i magazine.