Four slices of sweltering summer reminiscence. PST traditionally moves in dubby techno and ambient territory, often riddled with creative pitfalls of pastiche, nostalgia and meandering. Here, however, everything is so warm and hazy that the tracks just float gently over all of them. A very comfy and spacious listen.
You had to be there, I guess. If you weren't, this album winds up with a bunch of invoices from Remarc and Basement Phil stuck to the side of it, despite the impressive technical chops on display (particularly in the more densely packed drum tracks in the second half).
Considering that I've spent years getting yelled at through a mic and piles of distortion by the likes of Alec Empire and John Dwyer, the slight reverb and flange that follow Johnny's vocals on this album are pretty low on my list of potential gripes (I'd also argue that they fit the fleeting and wistful sonic nature of the album quite nicely, but your mileage may vary). My main interest going into this was whether Johnny would survive a head-on collision with a Nashville pop ... read more
Oof, I did not expect to dislike this one so much, considering how much I like Ilian Tape's back catalog otherwise. Skee Mask's inspiration blender feels like it's broken, churning out a half-curdled and watery emulsion of dub techno, ambient and the more inoffensive bits of Warp Records' Artificial Intelligence era. The album's reference points are obvious (especially if you've listened to any of Skee Mask's recent DJ mixes). Sadly, all of the space in the ... read more
I'd strongly recommend watching the ~45 minute interview with Armin van Buuren and Benno de Goeij about this album before listening (it's still up on the former's Youtube channel). It addresses several of the main arguments that people will likely use against the artistic merit of the album:
* "It sounds like (insert inspirational veteran electronic musician)!" Both guys make no secret of this entire project being an homage to old-timey synth wizards such as Vangelis ... read more
Man, rave gatekeepers HATED this stuff when Senni's first single on Warp came out. The label marketed this album with their tongues firmly stuck in their cheeks (hence the "Rave Voyeurism" censorship sticker spoof in the lower right on the cover art), and nobody seemed concerned with the risk of Senni's self-admitted distance to rave culture turning into merciless irony. Fortunately, while being a raver growing up, I also grew up with some of the same distance to the culture ... read more
Speaking of wholegrain rap... After having every major outlet for rap dominated by vibe merchants for decades, it does feel fresh that someone spends an album telling the audience that lyrics DO matter. It is a lot harder, however, to pull this off in 2024 against a musical backdrop that is so unflinchingly retro purist.
The actual handiwork on this album is basically spotless: Bez Evans' rap checks all the boxes for wordplay, timing and thematic content ("Chop" deftly ... read more
One ultra hazy vibe is basically what you get with this one. Tracks bleed into each other, WiFiGawd starts to sound less like a rapper and more like another instrument used for texture, and Hi-C takes more and more liberties on the production side as the tape progresses, until everything drowns in keys and low frequencies on "Five Star". A solid effort from two crafty vibe merchants overall. Knowing when to wrap up this kind of project before your audience has zoned out completely, ... read more
Six quick slices of wholegrain rap from the DC veteran, effortlessly delivered. Oddisee keeps the EP from cruising fully on soulful autopilot, thanks in large part to a couple of drill/trap flows that work surprisingly well when adapted to a conscious rap format. Still, it will always be tough to break through to a crowd of patisserie fiends with sourdough. A bit more sizzle will serve a project like this well.
This somehow cracked the top 50 in Germany when it came out. It has to be because of the radio edit, which severely dials back the unsettling atmosphere of the longer club versions. It also shortens the impact of the sample from Flatliners (which somehow sounds even more disturbing with German dubbing) and the rambling, nervous energy in the vocals about the side effects associated with Prozac. Bizarre fare, even for a country that lives and breathes rave culture, and it's hard not to read peak ... read more
Move D reduces "Pop For Dwoozle" and "Kunststoff" down to 44 minutes of urban Sehnsucht. The elements used here (sparse live instrumentation, muted pads, reverb, field recordings) aren't exactly reinventing the wheel, but the placement of them in the mix and their subtlety set the bar ridiculously high. If Sangam is the droplet-covered and cracked smartphone screen vision of highrise dysthymia, this is the sun-soaked and wistful city euphoria counterpart, one that really ... read more
A thoroughly satisfying feast of textures. MBM somehow manages to consistently pierce through Merzbow's dense and burning noise screen, warping and shaping it into hypnotic pylons of distortion that crash through the speakers and dissolve in a smoldering heap at the end of "Burner". A concise 36 minute runtime also ensures that the album concept doesn't overstay its welcome.
The press blurb for this album is a bit of a slog to get through. However, it happens to reference dada poet Tristan Tzara and his notion that “all things are seen as the part of the whole of existence and the whole is expressed in every part”. This idea has a lot of utility while listening to the album. It makes it a LOT easier to establish connections in the meteorite swarm of idea fragments that is centrifuged relentlessly around Kaito Winse's voice (African polyrhythms, echoes ... read more
What happens when you hold musicians up in customs and ask them stupid questions one time too many? Apparently, it causes them to yoink the musical baton from William Bennett/Cut Hands and hurl it at the nearest hole in the wall for the Home Office. While this album doesn't have Bennett's edgy power noise baggage, it also doesn't quite clear the intensity bar set previously by the Afro Noise series. The more spacey second half drags a bit, and "Baganga" deserves better than being ... read more
Dragon Ball rule #11: Don't split yourself into multiple entities when each one will only have a fraction of your power.
Holy shit, properly enunciated pop lyrics! It's gotten to the point that you almost feel time warped by this kind of syllabic emphasis in 2024. For an artist that writes psalms for Valerie Solanas, this album is played REALLY straight, which is both to its detriment (one painfully simply programmed drum machine is all you get, except on the wigged-out and spooky "Valerie") and to its benefit (a dramatic curve and narrative tight and efficient enough to almost be Freytagian in nature). ... read more
A bunch of intriguing emotional landscapes and precision-engineered rhythmic structure on offer here, bouncing low frequency pulses and ice cold, PAN style percussion off some of the most ultra-luminous arpeggios ever produced by a Roland JP synth.
Unfortunately, for those who don't really care about metaphysics to begin with (like this reviewer), the music on this album is based on ideas that effectively render the entire project DOA. In fact, on "Time (Tool)", Aisha Devi more or ... read more
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Recent Review Comments
On AndrewK's review of American Football - American Football
"I'll have to check this. The fact that you and @doofy ended up on totally different ends on the rating scale, primarily due to the lyrics, makes me curious as to how much they will ultimately end up bothering me."
On Sakuzyo - Food And Musik -Japanese Food-
"@Lagrange Glad I could help! I'm not sure how representative this album is of his usual work, since it's so thoroughly a concept album. However, I do get the impression that a lot of the drama and compositional structure carries over either way."
On 𝗩𝗶𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗮's review of Pitbull - Greatest Hits
"Haha, I mean, you're reviewing Pitbull. Subtlety is not really on the menu at that point. Same thing for "L'Amour Toujours", really, which is a whole can of worms on its own. I actually don't get the impression that the vocal performance for it was just another calculated pop move. The track just meshes too well with the other lesser-known stuff Gigi was doing at the time."
On Yung Exile - ISMOKEDANOUNCEINSPRINGFIELD
"Ah, nice! Looking forward to going even further down this rabbit hole, then."
On 𝗩𝗶𝗼𝗹𝗹𝗮's review of Pitbull - Greatest Hits
"This reads a lot like my morbid fascination with the music of Gigi D'Agostino. A complete aesthetic shambles, yet so deliberate that it winds up appealing to a kernel of something personal, somewhere."
On Doofy's review of Everclear - So Much for the Afterglow
"I think I'm one of the few people on here that actually quite likes "El Distorto De Melodica", as I mainly associate it with old skating videos. Everclear were smart enough to not add vocals, as that would likely have turned the song into a RATM lite/nu metal disaster."
On Botched Invocation's review of Hieroglyphic Being - There Is No Acid In This House
"Saw him live just before COVID lockdowns kicked in globally. Can confirm that it hits. The question is just for how much longer, as HB's music springs out of pre-COVID club dynamics."
On Botched Invocation's review of Revenant Marquis - All The Pleasures Of Heaven
"In that case, it's a pretty good album title."
On 𝔹𝕦𝕣𝕚𝕒𝕝's review of Sachiko M, Toshimaru Nakamura & Otomo Yoshihide - Good Morning Good Night
"@svse Is this album another random algorithm winner? I'm curious as to how this got so much attention on here, considering that it was released in 2004."
On AndrewK's review of Ansome - Knucklehead
"This more or less literally describes how Nasenbluten recorded "Steelworks Requiem". It sounds like a VERY lo-fi version of this EP."
On svse's review of 仮想夢プラザ [Virtual Dream Plaza] - 仮想夢プラザ [Virtual Dream Plaza]
"If your starting point for ambient music is that it should go somewhere, I think you're at odds with slushwave/vaporwave as a whole. The one-two punch of liminality and familiarity/deja vu is the key driver for the genre, and it only works non-sloppily as long as there is some retention of original retrofuturist critique. I'd argue that VDP is emblematic of the time when that gradually ceased to be the case, simply because the vibe became more important than the message."
On Botched Invocation's review of Boo Williams - The Best of Boo Williams
"Considering how vibe-based music is now, classic Chicago house would be due for another massive algorithmic resurgence, if it was actually concerned with keeping algorithmic pace. It is not, and so we get "Break My Soul" instead."
On Doofy's review of Old Saw - The Wringing Cloth
"Those track titles are tremendous. I hope the music lives up them when I take a listen later."
On homuli's review of Cosmos - Tears
"Looks like Erstwhile has it on Bandcamp, too: https://erstwhilerecords.bandcamp.com/album/tears"
On svse's review of TURQUOISEDEATH - Guardian
"@Gonam I'm not dismissing the album simply due to its focus on style. What's interesting to me is how people who come into drum 'n bass from different backgrounds wind up on either side of the dichotomy, and how this has moved the entire genre further down the highway to high definition (with the problems mentioned in this review being some of the side effects of that)."
On svse's review of TURQUOISEDEATH - Guardian
"@svse Alright then, I'll add that write-up to my list of projects. Need to record and edit some mixes for the summer first, but I'll try to gather some thoughts on this topic after that."
On svse's review of TURQUOISEDEATH - Guardian
"@dreamdesert I'd say the kind that places less focus on escapism and individual validation (not that I'm totally against just making some bangers, of course), and more on rhythmic experimentation and the subsequent exploration of adjacent cultural themes and narratives this gives room for. You can get there in a number of ways, like the Detroit-London connection on the "Naine Rouge EP" by Sinistarr, or "Radio Therapy Pt. 1" by Sci-Clone, which is another showcase for black jazz and improvisational tradition (Nathan Haines comes from a big jazz family). I'd put the guys in Machinecode up there, too. They're usually too concerned with pushing the envelope rhythmically to fall into the "cyberpunk aesthetic" trap."
On svse's review of TURQUOISEDEATH - Guardian
"Nice. I like a lot of these arguments, and you and some other people in the main review thread basically covered most of my thoughts on the album. There's a LOT to say about the 4K Ultra treatment that basically every creative current in drum 'n bass has gone through since the late 90s. In many ways, this album drags ambient and 4/4 jungle kicking and screaming out of the lounge and into the same style-over-substance dilemma. Maybe I should cover that more in detail with a review of my own after all."
On tha138's review of Hacienda - Sunday Afternoon
"Getting a <10 review almost seems better than getting this."
On Botched Invocation's review of Excision - X Rated
"I think Excision was around early enough to see what was going on with the likes of Dub Police and Flux Pavilion across the pond: basically a constant compression and saturation of space, until the pressure gets as intense and ultra-rigid (and ultra-unbearable, depending on who you ask) as it needs to be for the US festival circuit. Since space is finite, working like this kinda feels like a scorched earth approach. Where do you even go after the stadium dust clears?"
On svse's review of داریوش طلایی [Dariush Talai] - The Instrumental Radif of Persian Music: Radif of Mirza Abdollah
"Ah, yeah, I'm more willing to buy the argument that we aren't as in control of our tastes as we might think. The way you wrote it initially just felt like getting an entire bottle's worth of blackpills thrown in my face. I mean, why bother criticizing something that's just a vibe anyway?"
On svse's review of داریوش طلایی [Dariush Talai] - The Instrumental Radif of Persian Music: Radif of Mirza Abdollah
"If everyone is so boneheaded about music that aesthetic prescriptions are reduced to posturing, and if everyone's tastes are simply arbitrary, what's the point of writing reviews to begin with? Is everyone on AOTY just clout chasing?"
On helix's review of Sachiko M, Toshimaru Nakamura & Otomo Yoshihide - Good Morning Good Night
"Reviews in haiku format? I'm here for it"
On svse's review of Cecil Taylor - The Cecil Taylor Unit
"Dude... You're 20 years old. No matter what shortcomings within the field of aesthetics you may have, I'd strongly encourage you to look at them as unexplored terrain and untapped philosophical potential, rather than a sin that you must atone for. It'll probably make a discussion around the gamification of music and how it skews our perspectives easier to navigate, for instance. Don't get lost in the sauce."
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