Friday, May 23, 2008  12:48 am 

R_yth0m, RYTHVM & Rhythmus

When things are so disgustingly minimal that they are sometimes not even there, falling freefall into gloopy crimson love with it is all you can do. Its why Dopplereffekt rules so hard and darkly, its why I-f’s mastery of skeletal dance music elevated itself quickly away from the full teeth melting sickness of Electroclash back when all the Shoreditch DJ’s were dropping the two together in 2002. Minimal is one of the bestest.

Africans with Mainframes - Zodiac Rythms

But then work it like Africans with Mainframes (awesome name!) and chuck in an afro twist by gleaning the sheen off of Africa’s cityscapes in the year 2525 and coiling it meticulously around the wireframe of a track called “Zodiac Rythm”, and then you will have a beat workout that stutters with all the best hiphoppers and clicks like ADULT. mannequins got a pulse. Take aim with the weird noise gun and fling a metallically elastic buzzsaw sound periodically for maximum queasiness and disorientation.

Heroes of Greek discoplectic mythos, Hercules and Love Affair have seen fit to release the best track off of they’re sublime debut LP as the next single, namely “You Belong”. The standard album version sees vocal tradeoffs between the solarized pan-gender white ghost of aching emotional icey hell Anthony, and Nomi, the new wave chanteuse created from the dream of Shakatak collaborating with the RZA, crossed with the spirit that is released when Yazoo’s ‘Situation’ is played backwards in an empty New York warehouse.

Hercules & Love Affair - You Belong (Instrumental)

But the genius of the track with its subtle nods to the throbbing underbeat of Chicago, is even more so evident on the instrumental. The rudeboy bass undulates like a slick oil demon on a prowl that clashes in the most perfect of ways with the dubby piano riffs, illuminating iridescently in blackened corners of the clubs and creating polygonal cityscapes in the mind’s eye where everyone is dancing in a completely non ironic house disco way throughout the glowing streets.

picture supplied by Tommy Boy

Space - the final rhythm. Space is infinite as is the sound of the collage of torn circuitry that Reinhard Lakomy cascades across the cold blackness between Jupiter and Mars on bonkers Germanic sci-fi opus LP “Das Geheime Leben ~ Electronic”.

When Unicron was imploding with smaller but by no means lesser Transformers scurrying around his immense planet body in a classic struggle of the good vs the evil, he felt an aching sense of imminent defeat. Then the Matrix poured forth its blue flame of life and death and his horned head was blown clean off, flung to the cosmos with all sparks of life extinguished from it, left to forever orbit the Earth with dark dead eyes fixed on a planet that he should have consumed. Here is the sound that plays in his forgotten brainbox:

Reinhard Lakomy - Begierde Und Hoffnung

Or, echoing cybernetic death coils, sparkling nebulan Saturn rings unfurling from the gravity of its host into the negative pull of the Moon, beams of lazer strobes across a sky blighted by a solar storm, and nocturnal gatherings of the metal creatures who dwell in a sillicon jungle.

labels >> Hercules & Love Affair, africans with mainframes, reinhard lakomy