Karma "Thrillseekers"

Artist: Karma
Album: Thrillseekers
Label: Spectrum Works
Release date: 1999
Genre: Electronic
Style: Downtempo/Nu Jazz/Drum 'N' Bass
RIYL: Kruder & Dorfmeister, Tosca, Peace Orchestra

---

Tracklisting:
01. Overture
02. Let's Go Thrillseeking
03. Del Mar
04. Romance
05. Got My Mojo Working
06. Drunken Hero
07. 24 Hours Of Le Mans
08. Comeback
09. The Ballad Of Evil Knievel
10. Five Fourth Of A Whole
11. Fittipaldi
12. Danny's Break
13. Bateria E Baixa
14. Stupid Accident
Total running time: 71' 45"

---

[Karma - Let's Go Thrillseeking - Video Clip]

---

[Karma - My Resting Place - Video Clip]

"THRILLSEEKING, Karma's second album, is quite the improvement over their first, PAD SOUNDS. For one, the production is much smoother. Secondly, their songwriting is much tighter and more focused. The laidback grooves are still present, from "Let's Go Thrillseeking" (with its revving engine sounds) onwards. "Del Mar" has a strong rhythmic sensibility matched with jazzy undertones, while "Got My Mojo Working" takes the basic 12-bar blues and crafts it into a driving force. Wisely, the Karma boys keep the tracks developing throughout their length, in order to reduce the stagnation that hampered PAD SOUNDS. My favorite track, "The Ballad of Evil Knievel," mixes heavier sounds in with an easygoing rhythm and spacy synths. "Five Fourths of a Whole" goes for pure lounge atmosphere, while "Danny's Break" adds some scratches by the dextrous Danny Breaks. "Bateria E Baixa" increases the rhythmic content but keeps things grounded with a nice plucked bass. "Stupid Accident" ends things on a wandering note, a slow drive through a desert. A wonderful album, through and through." [scoundrel@discogs]

Sonic: I have listened to this album countless times, and I have yet to grow tired of it. It's the perfect soundtrack for when driving around at night in your car with the volume up to eleven: bliss! This one comes highly recommended if you like the nostalgia of Kruder & Dorfmeister's sound.

[Download]

Read More...

Summary only...

Luke Vibert "Chicago, Detroit, Redruth"

Artist: Luke Vibert
Album: Chicago, Detroit, Redruth
Label: Planet Mu
Release date: 16 July 2007
Genre: Electronic
Style: Acid/Techno/Drum 'n' Bass/Hip Hop

---

Tracklisting:
01. Comfycozy
02. Brain Rave
03. Radio Savalas
04. Breakbeat Metal Music
05. God
06. Clikilik
07. Argument Fly
08. Rotting Flesh Bags
09. Comphex
10. Rapperdacid
11. Chicago, Detroit, Redruth
12. Swet
Total running time: 63' 00"

---

"A true veteran of the UK electronic scene, Luke Vibert has, in the last few years, finally gained the recognition he deserves. His first dispatches saw him go from the ambient textures of his debut album as Wagon Christ to a much more acute and varied sound, infused with hip hop, soul, electro, techno, acid house and drum’n'bass. Distilled under a variety of pseudonyms (Wagon Christ, Plug, Kerrier District, Amen Andrews, Spac Hand Luke to name but a few) these have progressively become the staple diet for his fans. Yet, it took for the man to focus on one of his until-then somewhat overlooked strengths, acid, with his monumental YosepH (Warp, 2003) for the world, or at least electronic followers, to finally take stock and listen.

This second album for long term friend Mike Paradinas’s Planet Mu imprint branches out more than its predecessor, Lover’s Acid (2005) by incorporating, beside healthy servings of acid house and classic techno, decent helpings of drum’n'bass (Comfycozy), groovy hip-hop and trip-hop (Rotting Flesh Bags, Swet) and classic electronica. And as if to get his point across right from the start, it is with the bip-bop-infused drum’n'bass groove of Comfycozy that Vibert chooses to open the hostilities. All the way through, Vibert jumps from one genre to the next with disarming dexterity, effortlessly clocking mile after mile of dance floor mayhem without ever breaking into a sweat.

From the playful Speak’n'Spell assault of Breakbeat Metal Music and the heavy groove of Clikilik to the hypnotic Argument Fly, the slightly sombre Rotting Flesh Bags or the closing Swet, on which he spills library music all over an incendiary funky rhythm, Vibert gathers beats and grooves, stuff them with acid squelches and warm bass lines and delivers an extremely convincing collection of fresh and imaginative electronic pieces.

The standards rarely drop at all here, and despite the wide range of genres forming the core of this record, Chicago, Detroit, Redruth is surprisingly consistent. Fans of Wagon Christ will be as much as ease as those who prefer Vibert’s more purely dance floor orientated incarnations. It may take a few listens to truly appreciate the breadth and reach of this album, but the reward is well worth the effort.

Vibert was never a front-of-house master, at least in the early years. Often found circling in the background of more flamboyant friends, Paradinas included, his versatility was sometimes mistaken for a lack of particular focus, but he has proved the most reliable of long distance achievers as he continues to deliver slices of beats and grooves with insistent regularity. A truly hedonistic collection, Chicago, Detroit, Redruth is undoubtedly one of his strongest releases to dates, and it is incidentally also one of the most entertaining records released this year." [source]

[Download[pw:pleasureisourbusiness].Buy]

Read More...

Summary only...

Amon Tobin "Foley Room"

Artist: Amon Tobin
Album: Foley Room
Label: Ninja Tune
Release date: 5 March 2007
Genre: Electronic
Style: Breakbeat/Drum 'n' Bass

---

Tracklisting:
01. Bloodstone [Feat. Kronos Quartet]
02. Esther's
03. Keep Your Distance
04. The Killer's Vanilla
05. Kitchen Sink
06. Horsefish
07. Foley Room
08. Big Furry Head
09. Ever Falling
10. Always
11. Straight Psyche
12. At The End Of The Day
Total running time: 50' 33"

---

[Amon Tobin - Foley Room - Trailer #1]

---

[Amon Tobin - Foley Room - Trailer #2]

"For someone with such an uncanny aptitude for evoking a wide range of cinema-friendly mood music, Amon Tobin's potential as a soundtracker seems to have been largely unrealized. What he does have on his resumé-- the scores to stealth-kill video game Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, a surrealist, morbid Hungarian film about taxidermy, and a car commercial in which a group of presumably nude silhouettes contort their way into the shape of an SUV-- hints at why. Since Tobin makes no distinctions between background and foreground music and tends to wring as much distortion, dissonance, and rhythmic unease as he can from his jazz and orchestral-skewing sample sources, his music tends to evoke a malevolent presence that, whether skulking or charging, easily overwhelms all but the most immersive and eye-catching visual accompaniment.

The irony in Tobin's The Foley Room is that his cinematic ear has spurred him toward different motion picture-derived source material. Paring down his repertoire of bop debris and Ennio Morricone/Jerry Goldsmith evocations, Tobin's assembled his newest album as if he's decided he's exhausted the possibilities of musical instruments themselves and gone outside with a microphone to find out what sort of ambient sounds would make good beats. It makes sense in that the only thing that separates the manipulated sound of a household appliance or the drone of machinery from an electronically generated percussive effect is the element of familiarity; given the way Tobin's samples tend to transmutate traditional orchestration into concussed unrecognizability, manipulating a non-musical effect into a similar state is an inevitable step, one that he initially took in 1998 with Permutation and has been creeping towards ever since.

But while other musique concrète specialists such as Matmos aim to bring specific messages to mind with their thematic choices of sound manipulation, Tobin's approach seems to aim strictly for the aesthetic-- like two slabs of raw steak smacked together to simulate a punch to the head in some 1930s radio serial, the meaning of the medium's less important than how the end result sounds. Some of the effects' usage is a bit self-aware of their non-musical origins: "Kitchen Sink" is just that, a booming series of splashes that sound like elastic liquid dripping into a stainless steel basin and ricocheting its way down the drain; the fuzztone in the metallic drill-n-bass of "Esther's" is boosted by the rumble of a motorcycle engine, "Leader of the Pack" style (a rumble augmented by, and this required looking up, the sound of restless wasps); the title track introduces a few clamorous mess-making tumbles and crashes, shaped into something that sounds like the collapse of a kitchen shelf set to an Art Blakey drum solo.

But not everything is as blatantly laid out: The Robitussin whir that "The Killer's Vanilla" breathes through could be anything from a slowed-down pipe organ to a creaking set of gears passed through a filter or three, not to mention the way "Keep Your Distance" blurs the lines between woodblock-and-cowbell percussion and what seems to be the clamor of a recycling bin tipping over. Since Tobin still uses his share of musical instrumentation (including a memorable Slavic-esque string melody contributed by the Kronos Quartet on "Bloodstone"), figuring where the musician ends and nature or the machinery or the junkpile begins is intriguingly confusing. Supposedly there are recordings of ants eating grass and building acoustics somewhere on this record, but damned if they're easy to pinpoint amidst the beats.

Once the novelty of the record's field recording collage-job settles down, The Foley Room proves to be rhythmically consistent with Tobin's glitchy, post-jungle M.O., if somewhat exploratory; a couple moments flirt with dubstep but get too twitchy and restless to segue all that comfortably into your typical Burial track, and the broken-down carnival dance-rock of "Always" is just close enough to a genuine crowd-pleasing dancefloor number that it's a bit startling when the inevitable diamond-crushing load of distorted bass comes in. In the end, what makes The Foley Room Tobin's best album in seven years is the way his bent for organized chaos manifests as a deft control of every sound that surrounds him: Anything's a beat, everything's a break, and the difference between sound and music is entirely contextual." [source]

[Download.Buy]

Download bonus DVD: [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3]
Video: DivX 720x480 29.97fps
Audio: MPEG Audio Layer 3 48000Hz stereo 128Kbps

Read More...

Summary only...

Squarepusher "Hello Everything"

Artist: Squarepusher
Album: Hello Everything
Label: Warp
Release date: 16 October 2006
Genre: Electronic
Style: Drum 'n' Bass/Nu Jazz

---

Tracklisting:
01. Hello Meow
02. Theme From Sprite
03. Bubble Life
04. Planetarium
05. Vacuum Garden
06. Circlewave 2
07. Cronecker King
08. Rotate Electrolyte
09. Welcome To Europe
10. Plotinus
11. The Modern Bass Guitar
12. Orient Orange
Total running time: 63' 41"

---

[Squarepusher - Hello Meow - Live @ Koko, London]

"What with the Jenkinson clan now harboring another beat mangler amongst their ranks (Andy of Ceephax Acid Crew fame...), it seems that Squarepusher (aka Tom Jenkinson) has deemed the time right to reignite his love of crazy-leg rhythms and pickled electronics - with 'Hello Everything' a breathless collision of styles and influences. Picking elements from all his past work, 'Hello Everything' can be viewed as Squarepusher doing what Squarepusher does best; i.e. packing his compositions full of blistered beats, jazz breaks, lofty soundscapes and a cascade of melodies that makes this his most accessible work for donkey's years. Marking his tenth full-fat LP, Squarepusher has suffered in the past from dotting genuine jewels amongst less effusive work - with last album 'Ultravisitor' a fine example. Yet where that record had a scope and ambition that some listeners found off-putting, 'Hello Everthing' is undoubtedly Squarepusher's most rounded work to date; wherein his clever-clogs ideas never stand in the way of accessibility or a good tune. Kicking proceedings off with 'Hello Meow', Squarepusher immediately recalls the mutiple-beat pile ups of 'Go Plastic', as sliced snippets and cold-water bass map out a sonic topography that is very complicated but never over-awing. From here, 'Theme From Sprite' is another showcase for Jenkinson's superlative bass playing skills, as a tricky melody is subdued through the rolling low end, whilst 'The Modern Bass Guitar' will get Squarepusher fans all wistful for 'Greenway's Trajectory'. Elsewhere, 'Welcome To Europe' is a further nod to the more melodic path this new album seems to signal, 'Bubble Life' ropes in some Spanish guitar, whilst 'Planetarium' equals 'Big Loada' for visceral thrills. Still the f*cking daddy..." [source]



[Link removed at the request of the label.Buy]

Read More...

Summary only...