I Don't Either

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During 1994 and 1995, the Leaf label was responsible for releasing three of the earliest, most coherent 'leftfield' responses to jungle's breakbeat science: Boymerang's Boymerang and Pro-Activ EPs, and Witchman's The Shape of Rage. With the addition of Beige the Leaf roster can once again boast a genuinely fresh, individual voice. Despite hailing from Cologne, Beige - AKA Oliver Braun - would appear uninfluenced by the more self-consciously oppositional elements of that city's electronic underground. Instead, his work tends in the direction of the Sonig axis: Mouse On Mars, Lithops etc. These are musicians for whom pop is not a corrupting influence to be strenuously avoided, but rather a zone of fun-filled possibilities. Braun, however, does not possess MOM's talent for translating pop melodicism into a (relatively) non-commercial context; while, to him, the monotonal squiggles of synth he slathers over his tracks may sound engagingly perky, to this writer they mostly seem irritatingly twee. It is Braun's rhythms, however, that have brought him to the attention of many, constructed as they are from long sequences of tiny, granulated percussion samples, almost as if Braun had gathered up the offcuts from a long session of sample-editing, then randomly stitched them together. This manner of constructing beats gives I Don't Either something of the aura of a danceable Oval; while hardly funky, there's an air of mania to the whole exercise which challenges the listener to make some attempt, however doomed, to cut a rug. If not an unqualified success, then, with his debut album Braun has at least managed to bring some sense of physicality - albeit of a rather inverted sort - to the world of geektronica. We may expect to hear his name again.