Vorely Relay

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In another of those trendy, pseudo-celebrity remix relays, secretive French ambienteurs Ultra Milkmaids find their Noise museuM-released Vorely album given the strictly-European remix treatment by a tiny Japanese label whose previous claim-to-fame is a reissue of Kim Cascone's similarly inclined Poison Gas Research material. With their patiently crimped, crinkled, and creased melodic folds and twinkling glitches, the Milkmaids are often (and rightly) compared to the alchemical enticements of the Coil/Black Light District/ElpH family. Undiluted Milkmaids can be heard in Vorely Relay's brief "Relay" segments--to especially concentrated and cosmic effect in "Va 98.2." Fellow Frenchmen (and Noise museuM familiars) Icon Zero and Etereo Expandeum Club supply their mixes with grounding heft. EEE's weighty beats are of the sinister Wordsound-hiphop persuasion, while the aprés-Le Syndicat drum-machine mafia of Icon Zero weighs in with stomping drum n' bass pressure. Another Noise museuM alumnus, Celluloid Mata, guides "Lyr 40 122" down the starfield road through ascendant Schuetzian ambience. Other sympathetic readings come from Germany's Telepherique, from Vance Orchestra, and from Troum, the post-Maeror Tri project of Hannover-based Baraka[H]. Vance Orchestra's "Vor You-Vrom Us" matches the planar landscaping and horizontal, phaze-shifted guitar-glint involutions of Labradford and Stars of the Lid; Telepherique uses a looped bit of radio to streamline the Milkmaids' boundless atmospheric designs; and Troum's spectacular "Exic" rolls out a carpet of contoured melody and shadow across Infinity's threshold. At the other extreme, Netherlanders Goem and Captain Black (who share the ubiquitous Frans de Waard) break from the Milkmaids' mold. Their translations of Vorely's exalted ripples and time-wrinkles into stubbornly minimalist microwave pulses and superimposed hum is really somewhat pointless. In the context of the seamlessly compiled Vorely Relay, even these stark hyper-reductions make perfect sense. As a whole, this disc is something special indeed.