1.
The record industry is in the process of being outflanked by means of the very processes that it has come to rely upon. Since the 60’s its continual efforts to create new needs has meant that it nurtured an everchanging musical soundscape that is now mutating at such a pace that it cannot keep track long enough to harness these musical evolutions in the direction of profit. [Read more →]

One area of electronic dance music that doesn’t seem to be being explored is a more fucked up and experimental use of the slow-break. Force Inc.’s Electric Ladyland series is an exception and one of its frequent contributors, 4-E, has been plying this approach over a series of releases. The Don’t Fuck With Nails release on Force Inc., as well as the more recent Blue/Black on New York’s Home Entertainment label use hardened breaks and detailed electronic noise to create morph-beat tracks. Using slow breaks seems to be about creating spaces in tracks and rather than a wallowing beatless ambience or a muso referentiality to the past, the spaces can, in 4-E’s case, be alternately filled with treated sound, shards of flanged percussion, disco loops and a minimal subdued acid. [Read more →]

Uniformity breeds content breeds conformity… What were the 80’s? What was 80’s music? When D’arcangelo throw an acoustic psychogeographical spanner into the works everyone behaves like Pavlov’s dogs. I’m told that one side of their ep is “a joke” or “a waste of time”, that I should go for the noise side and ignore the other. O.k. So the label might be Rephlex, who wear their jokes to a veneer thin-ness, but now D’Arcangelo (under the name Centuria) have gone and done the same thing on that well respected label Zero Tolerance. What’s worse is that these ‘80’s mixes’ or ‘80’s compositions’ draw me in. [Read more →]

Source Direct/Doppelgänger/Christoph de Babalon/Panacea/The Advocate/Twisted Anger

“There’s a force that comes out of clashing frequencies which is to do with all the extra hum and tape hiss and reverb that shouldn’t be there” Nico Sykes: No U-Turn

Whether we call it tech-step or not, the bottom line always seems to be that the ‘music’ which activates us contains tension, rhythmic intensity, aggression and foreboding. Relays between dirge-funk and timbral density, between unknown noise and known information. Darkness can be synonymous to an appeal to the imagination, a sensitivity to the presence of psychic territories that surface melodics and oversweet harmonics only superficially activate. You either face up to it, take risks or plump for the protection of ‘idealism’. [Read more →]

All the record reviews published in datacide two, 1997 [Read more →]