Reviews versus rewards (was: Re: (idm) IDM bust it)
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On Wed, Sep 24, 1997 2:04 AM, Aran M. Parillo <mailto:aran@hyperreal.org>
wrote:
: What's the poop on Modus Operandi, I know what jsd thinks...what do you?
I think we have that rarest of things on IDM... a consensus. :)
Basically, what everyone else has been saying; it's a nice enough
listen, but after having my mind blown by various tracks
from the singles ("Ni-Ten Ichi Ryu", "KJZ", "The Third Sequence")
it seems a little tame/rehashed. One thing to mention is that
_Modus_ heavily represents the "mellower" side of Photek,
while the tracks of his I love most are the minimal percussive
paranoid ones.
As penance for basically just repeating what everyone else
has been saying, I'll append a couple of reviews:
The Other Day (CD) - Jeff Mills (Axis/React)
This is being sold as an Axis compilation, but it's
really just a Jeff Mills compilation since one
of Robert Hood's tracks on the label are represented.
With that out of the way, I'm surprised this
disc hasn't been discussed more, representing as
it does the first chance to buy these seminal
(heh heh, he said seminal) tracks on CD.
I think you'd be hard put to find a better
collection of listening techno (in the
_Artifical Intelligence_ sense of the term)
around these days. The tracks for this
comp were certainly selected with
the armchair in mind. The key word
here is depth -- tracks like "Solarized",
"Gamma Player", and "Growth" suggest
the "classical minimalists" like Reich,
Adams, and Bryars in the way they
play layered repeating figures against
each other in nonobvious ways, while
monsters like "i9" and "Spider Formation" suggest an
entirely new approach to working
with the ideas of 4 on the floor techno.
Auditacker (CD) - Mouse On Mars (Thrill Jockey/Too Pure)
Mouse On Mars are some of my favorite producers
because of their singularly idiosyncratic vision. They
incorporate bits and pieces of well-defined
styles (like ambient dub, drum and bass, krautrock, and
even house) and make things that sound like nothing
on earth but themselves. The sounds bleep
and burble like your stomach after a long
night eating jalapeno poppers, little detuned
melodies chase each other across the stereo spectrum,
and it never sounds contrived or self-consicous. I
remarked to a friend that the beauty of Mouse
on Mars is that rarely is experimental music
simultaneously this challenging _and_ this fun.
-d.w.