Dead Fader – Scorched – (Small but hard 03)
Scorched was released at the same time as ‘Blood Forest’ on Robot Elephant.
While ‘Blood Forest’ was presumably intended to showcase DF’s tender side, bringing back some bad memories for this reviewer of accidentally listening to some dodgy IDM tunes, ‘Scorched’ is a mostly nice heavy set. Creeeep‘s the big cut here. It first caught my ear as one of the stand out cuts on the excellent 3by3 label mix a couple of years back. A 140ish miltant smasher with a grinding b-line and snappy snares. Also worth checking are the beatless pieces like Danger zone which have an eerie Tarkovsky feel.

Dead Fader – In cover – (Robot Elephant 18)
Curious development: a vinyl release with three reasonably dull cuts in a meldodic IDMish vein that’s worth finding for the two distorted ear bleeders that are included as a ‘bonus’ download. Mandel and Ceaser were apparently leftovers from the ‘Scorched session’, and are two massive overdriven off-cuts. Would’ve made a heavy 7″: Ceasar getting the balance between tension and release exactly right, with an expectant, offbeat intro that cuts to nothing before smashing back in with an overdriven half-step rhythm, that’s too short, but begs the rewind; and Mandel slowly modulating disconcerting vibes under crunchy distorted breakstep drums, that weirdly ends with a minute long fade-out.

In the first of two parts, the dialectic of noise as both pacifier and intensifier is set against the ongoing transition from vinyl to digital sound carriers.

‘music represents at once the immediate manifestation of impulse and the locus of its taming’ (Adorno; 288)

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Vinyl as a format for distributing cutting-edge noise is continuing to decline. Trying to find more than a handful of releases to review for this issue of Datacide made this clear. Preference has always been given at Datacide to reviewing physical sound-carriers, and in particular vinyl, as it offers the best possible reproduction of sound. Noise reveals itself throughout history as having the ability to pacify or stimulate listeners, and therefore the production and distribution medium of noise can be viewed as a site of struggle. How should the move from vinyl to intangible sound carriers be viewed in terms of the potential for intensification?
[Read more →]

Noize Creator – The Future is Cancelled – Praxis 51

Crucial breakcore release from veteran producer Noize Creator who we haven’t seen a release from in a while, but who has been consistently mashing up the dance with his intense live sets. NC lays down a spacious sound across four tracks, pinning sliced breaks to solid broken rhythms, adding refined noise and details to tense atmospheres. Following Lifeform, Noize Creator’s 2012 smasher for the

Sub/Version digital division, that took it’s references from late 90s techstep, there is here also a reintroduction of ideas at a crucial time: a harsh functional sound. [Read more →]

Anonymous Series Vol.2- Praxis 45
The second of three volumes of anonymous broken noise that forces the listener/user to experience sound without any judgments about names/egos. Tracks range from the melancholic detuned synthetic strings, bass-quakes and cut-up broken tek beats of A1, to the snarling distorted mid, industrial dubstep riddim, cone-rattling subs and twisted, mangled double speed breaks of A2, to the spacious atmospheres and more
tek orientated broken beats of B1, to the strange b-movie atmospheres and lofi breaks of B2. Essential tools and limited to 300 copies. [Read more →]

The record reviews from the print edition – written by Nemeton, Eun, Kovert, CF [Read more →]