Greater Than One - G-Force

Excellent WaxTrax! era proto-industrial...

"Dancefloor Surrealists - and that's just the half of it - GTO
construct collages of multi-lingual samples and wacked-out noises to
cover their technological tracks. G-Force is a cartwheeling
combination of Steinski's nimble feet and The Young Gods' operatic
gusto, all stitched together by St. Winifred's style choir chanting
devil-worship slogans in the middle distance. "Ich Liebe Dich Mein
Prinz" energizes ethnic wailing seemingly recorded through a snorkel,
and "Black Magic" impales minimalist vocals onto a wiry violin while
sevarel Daleks dance themselves dizzy in the studio. Fragments of
MC 900 FT Jesus's harsh, dislocated chatter and Front 242's
leather-clad New Beat throb abound, with tons of Acidic sparks and
dadaist references tossed in for extra momentum. But the weirdest,
simplest track here is "Why Do Men Have Nipples?," marrying
snatches of American dating-game show dialogue with a toe-tapping
tape-loop of numb percussion." - Stephen Dalton, NME

Preview:
www.mediafire.com/?g217fj26i9xf5dtM

DJ Shadow - I Gotta Rokk EP

A 3-track preview of the new DJ Shadow album: The Less You Know The Better! I promise, its nothing like The Outsider; and although its not exactly like Endtroducing..., or The Private Press either, it is closer to the style of those two. I will tell you that it is eclectic and hard to define, but worth a listen.

Preview: http://www.mediafire.com/?3l1ocid6z5flfkk

Absence...

I apologize for the lack of posts lately.
I promise to get something up real soon...

The Orb - Metallic Spheres

I Say: I am both a long-time Orb fan and Pink Floyd fan, so this is like a dream come true; except I never would have dreamed that The Orb and David Gilmour would collaborate together! Both artists are known for their spacey, tripped-out music; one featuring echoing, reverbed beats, the other echoing, reverbed riffs. It's like that old Reese's Peanut Butter Cup commercial: You got peanut butter on my chocolate! No, you got chocolate in my peanut butter! Two great tastes that go great together!

Here's what pitchfork says:

Mostly wordless, full of spaced-out sound effects, and making no concessions to good ol' verse-chorus-verse structures, Spheres is a trip, to use a term once unabashedly uttered by Floyd devotees and revived by Orb aficionados with more of a knowing wink. A headphones record, in other words. Light show and chemical refreshment totally optional. Over two long tracks subdivided into shorter movements, Paterson and fellow Orb-er Youth thread together a post-rave library's worth of slow-rolli ng chillout-room rhythms, referencing everything from dub to krautrock along the way, as Gilmour sweeps in and out on guitar, dropping little shiver-inducing melodic runs like it's no big deal. Though his playing here meanders by design, Gilmour sounds neither lazy nor indulgent, more like a virtuoso who doesn't want to actually seem like he's sleepwalking through his performance. The Orb, on the other hand, are showing off in the best way possible, again crafting the lush, cosmic rhythms they were once so good at, hoping to impress a long-time hero. In the process, they also manage to impress listeners who've stuck with the band through some pretty ropey recent material.

Records like Spheres usually get filed as "ambient" these days, but that's not quite right here. Sure, it's gorgeous and hypnotic and more about beats than songs and all the things you'd probably expect from this pairing. It's also immersive in an old-school way, a long-player of a very pre-digital vintage, a record for people with enough free time (or a long enough commute) to lose themselves in a 50ish-minute composition. With its dramatically orchestrated peaks and valleys, it's an album designed to be listened to, to Take You Somewhere as you lay on your bedroom floor, to conjure futuristic images in the mind's eye of folks who were once teenage fans. In that sense, it's still not quite as successful as the Orb's classic material, and a little too subdued, lacking both the goofy sampleadelic grandeur and the ear-grabbing pop pulse of the Ultraworld era. But it's still the most focused and listenable Orb album in years. And hey, if you want to treat it as background music, that'll work just fine, too.

Download:
http://www.mediafire.com/?5th67ab06k4a43h

Lustmørd - Heresy

Review:
If there is one thing which is conveyed through Brian Williams’ sonic landscapes, if there is one word to describe what it is like to listen to, it would be 'terror'. Williams’ project Lustmørd is often cited as creating the dark ambient genre, and is still one of the finer examples of minimalistic noise which submerges the listener in droning, almost suffocating bass reverb and eerily unnatural noises. Lustmørd’s 1990 album Heresy is widely renowned as a masterpiece of the dark ambient genre; fusing together instruments and sound to create uncomfortable human emotions. There are places where the music is seemingly the background noise one would hear in a horror film; however, the difference between the laughable horror flick soundtrack and the unsettling ambience of Lustmord is the fact that it really and truly makes you feel uneasy by virtue of sound alone.

Ambient music is quite often difficult to describe, much less critique, because it can be interpreted in any number of ways. Take, for example, the second piece on Heresy, a ten minute saunter through a simple piece of soundscapes which comes across with much the same feeling I would imagine as sleeping alone for a night in a subterranean catacomb. Indeed, Williams has gone to great lengths to illustrate the seriousness and atmospheric qualities of his music. Through such methods as sampling recordings in catacombs, abattoirs, mines, crypts, and places where many people were killed, the music transcends the line between reality and nightmare. The only prominent instrument on the album is a Tibetan horn, awash in a thick cloud of rumbling bass. There is something unnatural and paranormal about Heresy which I simply have not seen replicated.

The album is a compilation of actual recordings from 1985-1989 carried out on site, and then fed through a computer to have sound levels manipulated and recordings mastered to the fullest effect, making the listener feel as if they are sitting next to Williams in whatever desolate and morbid place he chooses as inspiration for his music. The incessant droning of sounds whose origin remain a mystery, plays mind games with the listener, and to spin this album before falling asleep is surely asking to do exactly the opposite, because without a doubt you will be left wide-eyed, staring at the ceiling as this one hour trek through the darkness plays out before your mind’s eye.

Download:
http://www.mediafire.com/?dopjujd2paaxd3i

The Upsetters - 14 Blackboard Jungle

This is it: one of the earliest and best Dub albums ever recorded!

Originally released in 1973 with only 300 copies pressed; this album went on to become the Dub album by which all others are measured against.

The musicians featured on this recording are a litany of some of the best reggae musicians at the time... Augustus Pablo on his Melodica, Bobby Ellis on trumpet, Glen Adams on the organ, Aston "Family Man" Barret on bass and his brother Carlton "Carly" Barret on drums (both of whom would become members of the Wailers), Tommy McCook (founder of the Skatalites) on the piano, Valentine "Tony" Chin guitar, the list goes on; all great muscicians who came together under the divine sympatico of Lee "SCRATCH" Perry's inspired production and Osbourne "King Tubby" Ruddock's masterful engineering.

Highly Recommended!

Download:

http://www.mediafire.com/?yztywm2qr0u

Sleepwalk - A Selection By Optimo (Espacio)

Sorry for my lazy reviews lately but I am doing this from work and besides, sometimes I really don't know what to say; especially in this case!

So yeah, drink a bottle Robetussin and enjoy this one...

Pitchfork says:

Until now, Optimo's mixes have retained at least tenuous footing on the dance floor over which the two DJs have presided, every Sunday night, since 1997, Sleepwalk-- the followup to 2007's Walkabout-- is a fever dream of ambient muckracking and fucked-up balladeering. "Beats," in the debased vernacular of dance music, are few and far between; that the most uptempo cut here comes courtesy Mulatu Astatke, best known from the Ethiopiques series (and prime placement in Jim Jarmusch's Broken Flowers) should say something about the mix's profoundly narcotic vibe. This is head music, "listening" music, something like an alternate history of easy listening played out in uneasy selections from the likes of Nurse With Wound, Cluster, Coil, and, of course, those avant-garde stalwarts, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. There are moments that sound like background oceanscapes for run-down spas (SPOILER ALERT: they're Chris Watson, the Touch/BBC field recording artist, and former member of Cabaret Voltaire) and there are moments that sound like Rod McKuen over Wendy Carlos. Throughout, across tempos that range from the soporific to an easygoing Codeine andante, the melodic line sticks to a wormy sort of furrow, with dated synthesizers morphing into flutes, into voice, into trombones, into guitars flying 80s telltale delay, into fiddle, into still more dated synthesizers. In love with the midrange, the mix follows a line as unstably sure as the median strip on a particularly lysergic midnight drive. And having said all this, I'm actually loathe to explain any more about Sleepwalk. In fact, I'd like to propose an experiment. Buy the CD, if possible, and do what you can to avert your gaze from the tracklisting. If your habit is to immediately rip CDs into your computer, don't copy the artists or track titles. And then just live with the thing for a while. I had the good fortune to receive my review copy as a single, 73-minute MP3 with no identifying information attached, and the sheer experience of the thing, as hypnagogic as its title promised, was visceral and overwhelming, even in partial doses. Later come the reflective, intellectual surprises: this 80s throwback revealing themselves as secretive experimentalists, that Krautrock staple surely referencing magic mushrooms in their track title, and a particular (there could only be one) avant-disco figurehead dropping down in a shining beam of cello and trombone (ok, so I've given that one away-- it's Arthur Russell) at his most otherworldly and eternal and perfect. There will be plenty of time to go back and pore over the tracklisting, Google the things you don't know, find connections cleverer than any I've made here. But all of that pales in comparison with listening to the thing and losing yourself in its invented universe. This is the Make Believe Ballroom at its most credible and all-encompassing. It's an illusion you don't ever want to end.
— Philip Sherburne, January 29, 2009

Download:

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?ymqtmzz2dr4