Andrew Jones

Machine Drum Bidnezz Release Tour

Machine Drum Bidnezz Release Tour
Touring behind his third full length
this is the only UK date for Machine Drum.
The rest of the dates are below:

26.11 Bogen13, Zurich (SUI) w/ Plaid, Spezial Material, and more
29.11 University Sports and Social Club, Cambridge (UK)
01.12 Worm @ Calypso, Rotterdam (NL) w/ Jimmy Edgar
02.12 Scheune, Dresden (DE)
03.12 Nijmegen/Doornroosje (NL)
04.12 Voxxx, Chemnitz (DE)
05.12 Goldener Pudel, Hamburg (DE)
09.12 Bios, Athens (GR)
10.12 FR Strukturbruch @ Superkronik, Leipzig (DE)
11.12 SA El Garage Squat, Ghent (BE)

http://www.m3rck.net
http://www.machinedrum.net

To book Machine Drum in the future:
press at m3rck.net

Miles of Smiles

Black Dice
Miles of Smiles
DFA

When Mick Jagger penned the blazing sun-scorched ballad of white noise and 1000 hertz sinewaves for Kenneth Anger's Invocation of My Demon Brother, rock careened off the path of recognizability up till that point. Sure, Stockhausen and the like had done avant tuning of synthesizers for experiments, but Jagger's full throttle throwing of the moog into another realm (and not a terribly pleasant one) was the first time that rock anger possessed total annihilation of musical ability, it seemed to be the first time anyone made a worser of themself to express the torment of their soul. In the years that followed George Harrison produced his Electronic Sounds LP John Lennon and Yoko Ono practically made an art form of cutting down melody to nothing and used noise not as liberation but as a kind on entrapment. Anyway, no one was really paying attention to those LPs when it seemed like rock was the endless soul music of several generations of American and often rebellious youth. But rock has become a sonic death trap of a sort, something so riddled with Americana so fetishistically beloved that it's implosion in Lennon's outre moments or Jagger's moog based mental collapse might be the moment that rock learns a new trick, a kinda psychological backdoor created to evade the responsibility of feeding the white soul. It's here that Black Dice begin. Their intro cut as Beaches and Canyons retained an almost subliminal thump of rock's original blues chorus, but here on Miles of Smiles hoots and hollers are taken a back to the point of un-musicality, the rolling masculinity of the blues boogie machine is made sterile, movement ceases and a state of unprotected experiments begin. A lesson learned the ghost of rock starts to claw back in, a personality is being rebuilt, but the rocker from before is half dead trapped from paralysis. Yeah, that's Black Dice.
- Andrew Jones

Upon Cycles by OOO (ziq080CD)

Opening with all the impetus of an inspired video game, Nick Raftis' planet-mu debut is a dense cluster of various sounds so over polished it sounds like a hyper-real recreation of i.d.m. similar to Chris Clark's Clarence Park or 09's schematic premiere. 000 isn't afraid to treat the braindance melodic stuff with a touch of irony, forgetting all the pastoral cadence found in Twin or Mu-Ziq with out resorting to breakcore to keep you a-tuned. At least on most tracks, some of the middle filler tracks lose Nick's voice but are still good but a little generic electronica. What makes Upon Cycles such an addictive listen? In a world where a million copycats per second are pushing their Warp clone tunes onto zebox.com Raftis breaks with the stresses, syllables, and pronunciations laid down by idm's holy trio to make his own regional lisp on the entire enterprise.

Black Arts In The Town Hall by Bitmap (CD EP)

Bitmap is the one man output of Luke Bitmap. Belonging to that new fangled category of "indietronica," or perhaps more correctly here sample-deli-ca. Black Arts in The Town Hall is a single drawn from full length Alpha Beta Gamma. One good portion plundered sixties reverie stirred with soul and electronic backing, it leaves me with out the ability to complain. Jesus... now I have to say something nice about an album... hmmm....

What makes the album so appealing is the way Bitmap's various black arts sound so vaguely strung together, yet end up surprisingly, like a Pynchon story, well conceived. Accomplished instrumentally and in the digital realm, Bitmap isn't afraid to completely diss a perfectly good idea to segway into what are frequently equally satisfying folk-soul-video game themes. Due to this Bitmap manages to avoid indie-rock's greatest pitfall, total and complete boredom through excessive self-indulgence. Emo's immense guitar solos that seem to spiral into never ending neurosis or lyrical output so narcissistic and pitying you want to slap the vocalist don't ever crop up. If anything Bitmap seems like a less irreverent Beck especially when he hits the mic in full on surrealist mode. A flower of commercially successfully quirky idea makes up most of Bitmap's musical territory. Is this a calculated attempt to cash in on the Beck / Andre 3000 whatever-goes genre? Nah, there's no money in the music business, Bitmap is just a similarly peculiar mind.

One Is a Very Small Crowd by softland (sm 011 cd 007)

Duden, Softland's opening track to this debut album, could have established him running beside the likes of Xela and Adam Johnson in a new pack of i.d.m. cats equal parts Plaid and microhouse. All the clicks and satisfying crunches of super compressed techno make appearances coupled to a bass-line thick enough to propel it all along less like a pastoral hymn and more like a particular good jazz track. Unfortunately, Softland aka Christof Steinmann loses his focus as the album progresses into hopefully earlier material. "Sekvens," ties together all the beautiful but remarkably unoriginal noises he can make, but sounds more like filler. "Loipe," and "Stell," hit on a few good passages, but need editing. "Majken," cops out of having to rely on sequencing by building in amateurish clusters of well tread ambience. "Approach," and "Chanel," again are all full of good notes, but it's as if Christof lost the opener's combination of pace, structure, and noise. "Western," is elegiac but in no way especially effective borrowing to heavily from Warp's earlier releases. There's an artist waiting to break out here, but Softland needs to spend more time making his signature in melody and less in overlaying all the pretty noises of yesteryear.

Hendrix With KO

At this point in pop-culture's strange alterna-verse it's hard to deny that the fusion of organic pop musics, hip-hop, and electronica have given electro-rockers like Stereolab a run for their money. Here Canada's finest sequencer of the pop stuff turns in three pysch-bossa-hip-hop fueled tunes engineered to fulfill a platonic mold of good times.

Suitable for being dropped anywhere, Hendrix with KO is pop music unbridled by say structure, preferring to keep itself a-float on the inspiration that made spiritual jazz the most accessible of sixties' free a-tonal musics. How to explain, the sweetness of many musics distanced by location are put together in digital sequences that could be the Byrds only listening to Nara Leo playing with Alice Coletrane while let's say the Bee Gees play their gameboys listening to breaks records. If three of the references in the last sentence appeal to you, then you'll find similar company enclosed within.

Chiglaik

My initial response to Adam Johnson's Chiglaik album was yet another pleasantly laid back album from m3rck. The opening Eno/ Orb like statements of, "Changer demain," really make this evident. However repeated listenings make the finer aspects of Adam's music more apparent. A prolific tech-house DJ he's taken the complexity of beamed cuts ripped from minimal sonorities in Berlin or Cologne's metropolitan sound and given them the good times feel of stoned washes of reverb-ed chill-room era rave-lore. It's a combination that's at odds, at once a throw back to the pre-aphex days before acid crews were throwing breaks so jumbled your feet didn't have a chance to catch up with your neurons, and a pitch into the present world of techy clean cuts instilled with a fine sense of groove although Adam's boom and drums aren't products of minute micro-tonal clusters, but only carry the feel of Berlin's finest. While at times this could be a broadcast of NPR's Echoes the production values exceed the lazier remains of those days and Adam's time spent focusing on all that reverb gives the whole package solidity. Ambient music has come to mean self-indulgent and frequently boring music to me, but albums like Chigliak let ya know room can be made for infrequent equals to the Mixmaster Morris crown.