Ahem. [cough]
Buy this record buy this record buy this Goddamn record buy many copies
give them to your friends and family put this record on your damn stereo
and live with it for hours at a time like I am doing right now. Aiee!
I listen to some of this stuff and it makes it through half a listen
(_Light At The Edge Of Darkness_). Or less (_Tower Of Darkness_). Sometimes
a whole listen, and I say "That was very good, I'll know to listen to it
when I'm in the mood sometime" and I actually do that, and not just once a
year either (_The Demon-Haunted World_, _Shrine_, _Travelling Backward_).
Other times I say it and I never get back to it again and somehow don't
miss it (_Redshift_, _Ether_, _Octane_). Sometimes an artist has a
particular facet he shows that intrigues me, so some of his tracks are
replayed a ton and other stuff is never listened to (_Trikuti_,
_Lore_,_Dweller At The Threshold_), and sometimes he nails it and the whole
record becomes a repeat listen (_No Boundary Condition_).
And sometimes I listen to this stuff and I listen to it and I just go
Whoooooa and I put it on repeat and I fall into it and it fuqs my head
through one ear and out the other and it makes me think so hard I think my
head's gonna explode or it makes me laugh or cry or swear or just stop and
stare and I say YES this is why I listen to electronic music. Or do it. I
am lucky in that of the seven records I sell on Atomic City, I consider
most to be in this category, or to at least have large chunks that fall
into it.
This is another. Aiee YES!
Trippy rhythms, unusual sonorities, undulating moody atmospheres giving way
to sudden bouts of furious motion with a delightful loony glee. Hard to
accept freakish gamelan tunings mixed with standard western stuff, sudden
devolution in tempo and pitch, goofy voice samples ("Transport?!" is now my
new catchline rather than "Underpass!") lovely guitarish stuff (real
guitars? dunno) grootchy jungle slambo thudlike groove monstrosityness
clang whoop oh YEAH. It's so damn SILLY and it's deep and exciting and fun
and arresting and you just stop and stare and go OH YEAH and you're bopping
and everyone thinks you're having a seizure and they dump water on you to
snap you out of it and you spray water all around as you dance! Insane.
Very careful ordering of songs and ideas, a gradually ramping up energy
curve from "Whales In Fog" up to "A Shortcut to Nowhere" with one more
track to ease you down or trip you out for good, interesting segues and a
lovely selection of moods and tones that interlock to form an extremely
varied but worthwhile and coherent cohesive mosaic of sound and ideas, like
the best Team Metlay work but all out of one head and so carefully unified
and smoothly assembled into a perfect whole. Logic.
YOW!
Transport, sir? TRANSPORT?!
Oh man this is good. Oh MAN this is good! It is so GOOD. And I fully
understand why both Dave Law and Kees Aerts didn't want to carry it, and I
don't blame them a bit, but I weep for the genre when this kind of stuff
has trouble getting heard for very practical marketing reasons. Those
reasons do exist and they're real and not made up out of ignorance or
sadism and we must abide by them if we want to sell product and stay in
business--if people don't buy, the product loses the seller money. Case
closed.
But WHY don't they buy? It's just so SAD that people are likely not to plug
into this thing and groove on it the way they should. I don't know if he'll
say yes but I'm gonna ask Otso to sell me some copies at wholesale so I can
resell them in the USA to people who want them and maybe make them
available on my website because I'm not in the business of selling other
people's music but for Christ's sake SOMEONE has to sell this CD!! Does
Archie at Eurock have it? Does Lloyd at Backroads? Who's promoting it? DOES
THE WORLD KNOW?
Berlin School is good, it's great, it's FINE, and I'm glad it sells like
hotcakes. But. Have we forgotten that this stuff was EXPERIMENTAL 25 years
ago? It wasn't "Berlin School" yet, it was what people were doing with the
technology to knock open the barriers and try for something new. Mellotrons
weren't kewl and retro and they wouldn't be for decades, they were what was
available, we love them for their character now but if you took a time
machine and went back and offered those guys a choice between a Mellotron
and an Emulator III or a Fairlight in 1973 do you think more than a couple
of them would have said "Nah, I prefer tape"? Get real! Doors are still
opening, new technology abounds, new ways to do this stuff and more
importantly to THINK about it are opening up every day and people like Otso
and Nick Rothwell are putting out brilliant examples of this wonderful
quirky intense newness and everybody would rather listen to Moog modular
sequencer loops and Mellotrons and that's just so damn UNFAIR.
And I'm so frantically typing that I'm not watching portion size and I just
stuffed an enormous fuqqing pile of CornNuts into my mouth, the Chile
Picante flavor, and they're really spicy and I can't breathe and tears are
running down my face as I type because I can't stop I have to tell people
about THIS CD!
Okay. Calm. Okay.
You want a recommendation? Here's a recommendation. I have a brand new CD
out that I sank five years of my life into (off and on) and that I'm
really, really proud of, and I'd love it if you bought a copy from me.
Believe me, I would.
But if you have to pick which CD to buy first, buy _Insane Logic_. Then get
a copy of _A Huge And Silent Place_ as a way to come down gently from the
place Otso's unbefuqqickinglievable record is going to leave you high and
dry.
AIEE!
mike