4E - 4E4ME4YOU

Back to Cologne for another freaky dose of the mighty Khan. Released in 1998, this is actually by Khan as his alias 4E 'introducing DJ Snax'. I'm not sure exactly what Snax contributes to this (just looking at the liner notes: co-wrote 2,3,10; additional keyboards and trumpets on 5 & 9) but this has Khan's personality stamped all over it.
This album is made up of the murky, granular and acidified instrumental hip-hop beats that were being released on the Pharma label, and by some of his compatriots who had moved on from the more bleepy spaced out techno of the early/mid 90s. Air Liquide pursued a similar path, but to be fair, they were doing it pretty early on. This loses none of the trippyness of the earlier work, but achieves the mong-factor through different methods. The beats are insistent and thuggish, and overlaid with freeform acidic splurges, manipulated vocals and a kind of lurching, drunkenly woozy danger; like a possibly scary dude looming in and out of your face speaking a loud foreign language at you in a strange club at 4am, when your eyes aren't focusing properly and you keep having to remind yourself where you are.
It's not all menacing weirdness - there are some cheeky tunes, like the perky 'Smoke Me Up I'm A Cigarette' and 'Stay Fresh', and 'Sleep Taster' and 'Swamp Foot' hit danceable speeds. My favourites, tough, are the slow moody numbers - 'Sonog' weaves some strangely manipulated Polynesian-sounding female vocals aroung a chugging fist of a beat, with some growling analogue. Probably the best of all is 'Iglesia Pentecostal De Electronica', which has Tie Fighter samples added to completely mashed vocals and disconcerting out of time industrial percussion.

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Marc Ribot - Asmodeus: Book Of Angels 7

This is Volume 7 in John Zorn's massive Book Of Angels series - a series I have found it pretty impossible to keep up with, what with all the other music in the world. Not to mention the stuff. The others I have heard: Secret Chiefs 3, Zorn with Medeski, Martin and Wood; Bar Kokhba have all been excellent, so it's probably worth checking them all out. Marc Ribot is perhaps most famous for playing with Tom Waits, but on this disc he is eschewing his tasteful embellishments in favour of acid-jazz/rock onslaught, in power trio mode with Trevor Dunn and G. Calvin Weston. The results vary from chugging heavy riffs such as the opening of 'Dagiel', to more free jazz explosions, such as the opener 'Armaros'. Whilst they stay in touch with Zorn's East European/Klezmer themes, they rock them up beautifully, and intersperse wilder, freer passages of group improv and fret burning. I don't mind admitting that I prefer the slightly more structured numbers, and 'Mufgar' and 'Sensenya' are fantastic masterpieces of controlled acid power trio chaos: superb riffs backed up by relentless chugging bass runs and beautifully swinging propulsive drumming.

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Kemialliset Ystävät - Kemialliset Ystävät

Self-titled/untitled 2007 album from this Finnish collective. Psychedelic is the only word for this - gloriously trippy and mangled. There is a real organic, homespum feel to this music; as if it was conjured out of homemade instruments and recorded onto a walkman. There is obviously some heavy effects work, but it all sounds so natural. At times it sounds like just about every instrument that exists was used - all at the same time: there is a woozy, lurching, deranged and cacophonous non-structure driving each track along with some inverted wood-elf logic, which is no logic at all, but sounds wonderful. Bubbling, burbling wobbly noises pootle about, over garbled mong vocals and cast-off Magic Band runs played on improbable stringed instruments, while some elaborate pump-driven mystical noise generator flings out squelches and belches. If this all sounds a bit improv, the tracks are held together with a driving harmonic unity and sense of euphoric glee, just about kept under control.
Excellent, beautiful, and very weird.
Recent album Ullakkopalo is also excellent, so buy that. Both albums are still available on vinyl, too (Norman Records in the UK)- I recommend Ullakkopalo as it has some excellent artwork on the sleeves.

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Various - Acid Techno

January's a bit shit, isn't it? Here's some acid techno - it never fails to cheer me up. This selection runs from 1988: Bam Bam's sinister and brilliant 'Where's Your Child?' through to about 10 years later. I had to include a couple of Hardfloor numbers, obviously, since they are the absolute masters of the form. There's also a couple of Richie Hawtin efforts - an early, headfuck one in 'Substance Abuse', and the relentless acid epic of his System 7 remix. Some of my favourites are the slightly less well known tracks that rocked my socks back in the day - Gamma Loop, Hexagone and Cyan are particular favourites, and my vinyl copies are suitably crackly. (The mp3 of Cyan unfortunately has a skip). Actually, they are all favourites - the list could have been massive, but these are just the ones I've collected on mp3 over the years. For some reason I feel I should point out that I have all of them on vinyl except the Edge Of Motion one, which I've never got around to buying.
If you have trouble collating these tracks in your player, album artist is 'white dot acid techno'.
I hope these tunes soundtrack a spannered evening for someone, somewhere.
1 - FUSE - Substance Abuse (Warp)
2 - Gamma Loop - 4X3 (Hyper Hype)
3 - Robert Armani - Circus Bells Hardfloor Remix (Djax)
4 - Hexagone - Burning Trash Floor (Djax)
5 - Alaska - The Thing (F Comm)
6 - Hardfloor - Confuss (Harthouse)
7 - Bam Bam - Where's Your Child? (Tresor)
8 - Air Liquide - Psy 9 (Blue)
9 - System 7 - Alpha Wave Plastikman Remix (Butterfly)
10 - Magenta - Boost (Experimental)
11 - Cyan - Peacekeeper (Experimental)
12 - Barbarella - My Name Is Barbarella/The Spaceship (Harthouse)
13 - Edge Of Motion - Set Up 707 (Djax)

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Chrome - Blood On The Moon

Weirdo sci-fi new wave proto-punk from 1981. Edgy and slightly deranged, primitive grooves and processed vocals abound, with heavily phased, fucked and flanged keyboards and guitars panning around the mix. This falls somewhere in the middle between Simply Saucer and Weird War, with bits of Devo, Hawkwind and Low-era Bowie (or his band, at least) thrown in. It's all delivered with speed paranoia post punk energy, and speared through with searing guitar lines, and littered with enough kosmiche debris to make it freaky and unique.

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Air Liquide - Neue Frankfurter Elektronik Schule

A classic for Christmas. From 1992 this is archetypal Cologne business - deeply atmospheric and trippy. It's all one track, so you get samples of UFO spotters over ultra deep and spaced synth washes and bleepy noises. These blend into speedy acid trance-outs, with pattering drums and squiggling 303s. Swathes of panned static, radio noise and samples are the backdrop. It's a formula I love, and an album I love.

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Salaryman - Salaryman

1996 album on City Slang by this bunch of geeky-appearing bods (I saw them live), that seems to have disappeared into a historical crack. Sumptuous psychedelic grooves abound, with a plethora of overdriven synth lines and a heavy, over-arching sci-fi ambience. Live drums are the driving force, with a backdrop of whispered speech loops, but the trippy looped synths are the stars - pulsating blips and burbles alongside moody throbbing tremelo waves. A live band feel adds a sense of urgency to the sci-fi paranioa soundscapes, and indeed they were pretty good live. It's all good, but closer 'Hummous' is a highlight, with its squalling harmonics and heavy drone dirge; bettered only by the magnificent 'Voids And Superclusters', which lives up to its stellar title: a swirling black hole of churning synths, that has an almost Electric-Wizard-heavy moment as the pounding bass kicks in to glorious, stomping effect.

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Kiyoshi Izumi - Effect Rainbow

I've been a bit slack recently, so I'm going to post a couple of EPs tonight, and not write much about them. First up is a brilliant EP from this obscure Japanese gent. This 3 tracker was released on Rephlex in 1997. I don't remember if it caused much of a stir, but I bought it on vinyl and was blown away by it. It's full of oddball melodies, wonky drums, and crazy arrangements. There is some great drum programming, and some strange little samples and vocals thrown into the mix for extra trippy effect. There is a real eastern feel to this, from the chiming, ringing sounds that evoke old Japan, and also from the 8-bit game noises bleeping about. Fabulous stuff, that really peaks on the last track 'Bedroom Glow', which is a bit of a rocker.

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Bardo Pond - Set And Setting

I love Bardo Pond - a fuzz/drone/psych/space ensemble, heavy on the bongtastic distortion and wasted atmospherics. Their particular formula is a lush, sludgy, hedonistic sounding one that especially appeals to me. Isobel Sollenberger's drawled vocals aren't too dissimilar to Kim Gordon's, and perfectly fit the super-loose, bluesy psych-fuzz riffs. First track, the 11 minute 'Walking Stick Man' sets the tone in wonderful fashion: a swaying groove churns along, with perfectly damaged vocals, and a wall of glorious fuzz, helped along by Sabbathy harmonica: it's a woozy worshipful hymn to the power of distortion and the guitar. Actually, the whole album is. 'This Time, So Fucked' steps it up a notch, with some wailing wah fighting off feedback. There is a bit of variation - the disembodied and detached 'Datura' is on the verge of descending into shaking-eyed psychosis, and is following by the chugging and thunderous rock out of 'Again', before the 9+ minute 'Crawl Away' returns to the meandering, head nodding fuzz waves. If you like this, check out 'Peri' and 'Amanita', although all their albums I've heard are pretty good.

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Khan & Walker - Radiowaves

I haven't posted anything involving Khan for a while, so here's another excellent album beamed down from the acid bleeposphere. There's super-minimal packaging on this one - they usually tell you what kit they have used to make their records, but I'm pretty sure it's the same equipment they were using on all their other releases around 1995 when this one came out. Actually, my album cover is different to this one, but I can't seem to find a decent image of it. This has the usual crispyRoland percussion pattering away; phased and dazed synths sweep across the background while acid lines, bass and the odd syncopated mid range line bubble and swing in the centre of your headphones. Throw in the odd bit of speech sample, some high wispy frequencies, twiddle the knobs a bit, and there you have it - a classic snapshot of the Cologne sound which is glorious to my ears: deep, spacy and trippy. The beats are all fairly light - no pounding 808s, here - ranging from slow breakbeat rockers, to jittery electro, and 5am trance-out on the splendid and epic 'Radiowaves 4'.

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White Rainbow - Prism Of Eternal Now

Rather superb space-psych from one man band Adam Forkner. The fabulous opener 'Pulses' is a real statement of intent - bongos and shakers usher in a fat analogue synth riff, which is soon accompanied but some fantastic looped vocal ejaculations - referencing the kind of 70s art rock/serialism of Laurie Anderson, and some kind of ecstatic stereo pan sect. Then in come the stratosphere-scraping lead synth and guitar(?) and the track takes off into space, with some more chanting for company. Gorgeous and sublime freakery. Although it's possibly the highlight, every track on this album is excellent - there are lushly cosmic ambient washes like 'Waves', 'Awakening' and 'Middle' - flotation tank splendour. There is more wild and driving psych in the shape of 'Mystic Prism', and further expansion of the sound in the electronic dubby textures of 'Warm Clicked Fruit', which brings to mind the warmly enveloping digital pulsations of deadbeat and Vladislav Delay. There is another fantastic avant synth exploration in 'For Terry' (Riley), which has a similar fat mid range analogue synth wobbling along in a strange out of time sequence, while a high pitch line oscillates and flutters upwards. Then some beautifully processed lead guitar comes in, recalling mid-70s Fripp, and a more rocking take on his collaborative albums with Eno.
Luscious and deeply psychedelic, this is a real recent favourite of mine. This and the more recent White Rainbow album are available from Kranky: what a brilliant label - so much good music. Go there and buy something direct from them.

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Boredoms - Chocolate Synthesizer

Another band I saw recently, although their current incarnation sounds quite different to this album from 1994. They currently play with varying amounts of drummers (7 the other night), and churn out a kind of bludgeoning performance art space rock. Main man Yamatsuka Eye had a pretty cool multi-necked guitar totem thing, which he would bong occasionally with his wand.
Ideally the picture of this would be here, and not at the top, but I can't get blogger to upload pictures where I want them to go, which fits in nicely with the general air of retardation that imbues this album. It's full of greasy mong-riffs and guttural imprecations, screaming derangement, bursts of noise, hardcore style rock outs and general freakish lunacy. Probably best not listened to with a raging hangover, at all other times this is great fun, and often hilarious - generally for the nutty vocals: 'Smoke 7' is a particular favourite. The cover gives a good impression of the music, prompting the question 'What the fuck is going on?'

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Skullflower - Orange Canyon Mind

Utterly glorious noise psych-out from Matthew Bower. Euphoric, blasting, coruscating waves of fuzz; juggernauts of pulsating bass. Warping witches' fingers of liquid sound lick at your ears like cold flames while crashing planets destroy the gravity in your brain. That's just track 1. Despite being cacophonous, this is beautiful to my ears: it's a richly harmonic maelstrom of overdriven analogue. I'm not sure how it was created, but it's super-effective: all kinds of power-electronics mayhem, plus some acid guitar, and barely audible percussion in a thick, lurching, surging syrup of cosmic goodness.
Sometimes the tracks are underpinned by spacy nodding grooves, sometimes there is just a clenched roar of sound, an electrical storm of wild sonics; but there is always a dense and captivating tapestry of noises, tunes and distortion.

Buy it from crucial blast

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Gong - You

This blog has now been going for a year! There is no better way to celebrate this anniversary than by posting one of my all time favourite albums.
This was released in 1974, and is third in a trilogy of albums that also includes 'Angel's Egg' and 'Flying Teapot', both of which are excellent, and highly recommended, as is 'Camembert Electrique' which precedes them. This album, though, I think is the pinnacle, both of Gong's output, and psychedelic/space rock in general. The playing throughout is absolutely masterful; and the arrangements are completely brilliant. There is a fair amount of silliness, it is true, but I love every second of it, and it helps create the dramatic dynamics that drive the album along. The way that the two short whimsical opening tracks segue into the very spaced out chanting of 'Magick Mother Invocation' which becomes the blistering, heavy progged out space rock of 'Master Builder' is magnificent. Steve Hillage is on fire here, and the bass and drums pretty much rival the heaviness and technical excellence of early 70s King Crimson. Also, the horn/wind playing of Didier Malherbe is an absolute delight. The key element that completes sound is the brilliant use of synths, which are particularly showcased on the next track 'A Sprinkling Of Clouds', where they beautifully build up a trippy spacescape which leads into another heavy freak out. The interplay of Daevid Allen and Gilli Smyth's vocals, another great feature of Gong, is shown on the next short track 'Perfect Mystery', which also has some awesome drum fills from Pip Pyle. The last two tracks are an excellent long jam with a terrific groove, allowing some extended solos; then a real Gong masterpiece in 'You Never Blow Yr Trip Forever' winds down the album perfectly. Awesome stuff. I still get pure unadulterated joy from listening to this, 18 or so years after I first heard it.

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Tipsy - Trip Tease

1996 album from duo Tim Digulla & David Gardner, with the help of a horde of musicians. This is a giddy and psychedelic fusion of the already-weird sounds of Les Baxter-styled exotica; mashed together with the then-current sounds of experimental trip hop and a palette of loungetastic horn stabs, vamps and not-so-E-Z casio-keyboard-gone-wrong plinky plonky cheezerama, soundtracking rictus-faced grinning flourescent zoot-suited 50s TV presenter-clowns on acid.
Marvellously executed - everything is played live by the en-suite musos, then sampled, looped, edited and generally manipulated into a freaky yet 'seductive' weird-out: a blend of swinging advert music for space-age fridges, bombarded with springy cartoon sound effects and twangy surf guitar. It's all joyous good fun, but with a real undercurrent of hallucinogenic displacement, which means it could cheerfully soundtrack any party population from Eleven Mustachioed Hipsters, to ultra-heavy hair-bear bunches.

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Various - Temple Records NYC vol 1

More Germanic goodness from 1995. Despite that hippyish-looking cover this has nothing to do with trance, and comprises tracks by Khan, Walker and Jammin' Unit under various aliases. There are some nicely distorted monolithic robo-groovers in here, but the compilation is dominated by Khan rocking his 303 into oblivion on 'Blues', 'The Truckdriver' and the blistering acid of opener 'Praise The Lord' as the aptly named Madonna 303.
I went to the Temple Records shop in 2001, where I bought a couple of Khan 10"s. I wonder if it's still there.

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Richard Thomas - Soggy Martyrs

Rather odd and wonderful offering from 1999 on the excellent Leaf Label. Richard Thomas has definitely got a good grasp of the terms 'weird' and 'wrong', but he keeps it pretty low key on this album; unless you turn it up loud, I suppose. This is like Blue Jam sublimated into purely musical form. Over an often fairly down to earth premise - a shuffling drum beat, say, a whole load of queasily played horns lurch around in a monged fashion over lots of processed samples and unsettling noises. The attention to detail is terrific, but the profound weirdness of it all could easily pass you by, as the general sound is often one that approaches a kind of easy listening - trumpets parp, guitars are strummed, drums are drummed; on 'Manicougan 5', for example - but they are played like a band whose members are on different planets, so to speak. It took me a while to get a handle on this album, and then it suddenly all became clear: what an unhinged master Richard Thomas is. Some of it certainly reminds me of Mike & Rich - Expert Knob Twiddlers, but these tracks are far more freeform in structure, and fade in and out of a hazy, muddy ambience. With extra jazz noodling.

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Korea Soundblaster - Korea Soundblaster

From 2003, this album is a wild blast of completely acid-drenched mayhem. It's a full-on, saturated melting pot of metal riffs, deranged warbling vocal samples, bombastic organ, stumbling drums, outrageous dub echo and distorted noise. Not to mention the OTT moog-style burblings, atonal guitar leads, screams, bleeps and unidentified scary noises. All this is mashed together with little regard for niceties such as song structure or pleasing melodies, but it's such good fun to listen to that these absences are irrelevant. The songs tend to fade into each other, making this one long, crazed assault on your senses.
Thanks to Dimitri for this one.

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G.E.N. - Rolleiflex Weltron Time Square

More trippy deep-space electronica from two of my favourite German artists, Khan and Walker, recording as Global Electronic Network. Released in 1994 on Mille Plateaux, and recorded in New York presumably just after Khan had relocated there: I don't know if the title 'Time Square' is intentional or not, as it's pretty apt. I have this on vinyl, and one half is a really nice picture disc with the classic Rolleiflex camera on it; unfortunately the 'Weltron' disc had to make do with a picture of the classic 8 track radio on the label, with coloured vinyl.
Time Square opens the cd, with an epic 15 minute hypnotic track, with great phased ambience swirling around in the background while a host of heavily reverbed analogue synths propel the track, whilst acidic flourishes and weird samples drift in and out. I can imagine these two hunched over their machines, bobbing up and down, twiddling knobs. The same goes for Time Square pt III, which is basically a spacy hypnotic club track; driven by restrained 303 bass and with just enough strange samples panning around to make this successful head music. The two Weltron pieces are short and abstract, where the analogue machines are put through their paces to extract weird and wobbling noises: probably the least diverting pieces.
The two Rolleiflex pieces take up 35 minutes of this album, and show Khan and Walker's creativity to the greatest effect. They are also the most outright trippy tracks on here. Rolleiflex part IV-VIII comes first, fading in the kind of classic Air Liquide/H.E.A.D beat - a shuffling and gentle 808 breakbeat, with bleeping and pulsing acid noises reverberating around, building up a real head-nodding groove. This fades out into some more disturbing and distorted territory, before a pulsing and ominous synth comes in, with what sounds like an acidified warthog trying to sniff your brains through your ear. These sounds hark back to classic German 70s electronica, and are glorious, and very cosmic. The 20 minute Rolleiflex I begins with an off-kilter beat, with some very odd metallic sounds scraping the brain cavity, as the FX units are tweaked. A gentle 303 bass takes over as the beats retreat, and high pitched bleeps usher in a raga like passage, before bubbling and syncopated acid lines come in to finish the track in suitable fashion.
A terrific album of trippy analogue electronica.

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C/Sphere & Mark Gage - Microset Morning

An excellent EP of trippy, far-out techno from 1993. Released on the excellent Telepathic label run by Fred Gianelli. I was going to rip and post Gianelli's own Fox Hunt, which is amazing, but this chap has already posted it on his brilliant blog.
Back to Microset Morning: I have always regarded this as a Mark Gage release. The man responsible for the awesome techno classic Gravitational Arc Of 10. It was only when I came to post this that I realised that it was by C/Sphere, aka Coleman Horn. However, the label states "Produced and edited in Vapourspace by Mark Gage", and this has his signature sounds all over it. Sci-fi bleeps and blips swoop around the mix, while a modulated mid range synth churns out weirdly un-syncopated arpeggios. The bassline is one of those bubbling, clustered, lumpy affairs that doesn't particularly accent the beat. It's similar to a lot of Robert Hood basslines, although in this case it builds up and peaks to quite euphoric and mind altering effect. In addition, the beats are relatively gentle, and this made it a post-club mixing favourite; although it can be quite a challenge if your brain is not all there. Basically there are three fairly similar versions of the same track. It definitely sounds like the machines were left to run, and a bit of editing was done later. The 11 minute 'Drift Com' has the greatest degree of arrangement, and has extra spangly noises to spin your brain out just that little bit more, but they are all great. In addition there is a short, beatless abstract oddity which is fairly nice.
nb #1 - I saw Mark Gage live at the Ministry back in the 90s - he was excellent.
nb #2 - Mr C introduced me to this record, when he was doing a show on Kiss back in the 90s. Many people may think of him as the clown out of The Shamen, but he was an excellent DJ. I'm sure I still have the tape somewhere - it was a great mix. And his label was superb.

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