Catching The Waves

That Wallpaper Has Got To Go

To Baaaarcelona, in celebration of a top-class football club netlabel that has been banging in the goals pumping out excellent releases for quite some time and has now achieved the miraculous and got Carles Puyol to cut his hair reached number 50 in their release schedule. End of football jokes.*

InoQuo has come over all giddy and released a nine-track compilation of top-class minimal/techno. Like just about every other netlabel album in this genre, Kvindek doesn't conform to CTW's infamous first law of dance music (the first of my minions to post a comment stating what it is will receive a free CC track from CTW's vaults), but that doesn't stop it from containing studio wizardry and buttock-seducing rhythms. To demonstrate, I'll recommend the first track as I'm fond of the aural tricks it plays. You get classical guitar, reverbed and chopped voices, and tooting synths - and that's just in the first few seconds, before a ridiculously close-up high/low frequency stab is plopped in your ear. It then proceeds to groove with the help of the aforementioned elements and the addition of pitch-shifted tubular bell-like...oh, hell, why am I burbling on? Suck it and see:

Sr. Click - Tamagotchi

Hermético's Nueva Fórmula doesn't actually break new ground, but what it does it does very well. A bumping bass, abrasive snare, tannoy-like vocals, tiny little glitches (a feature of the entire EP - there's nary a moment that hasn't been worked to within an inch of its life) and a fast pace ensure that this will burn the calories. Turn up the volume and it comes to life - as does En Casa De Paola by Monokao, whose kick-snare-repeat-till-unconscious mantra drives the minimal nail into the ground with a big techno hammer, restrained only by the occasional speak-and-spell vocal. The excellent mastering overcomes the compositional simplicity through sheer power. It's a banger.

But it's not all dark dancefloors and sticky t-shirts. Modular by Saccobros is one of those minimal tracks that, if you squint a bit, could be described as electronica or even ambient, because the usual percussive framework is swamped by a Nintendo-ish flurry of triplets that swells and contracts with hypnotic rhythm. It's like listening to an electronic seashore.

Mercurio by Manuel Romero starts off ordinarily enough, but little glitches, snatches of conversations, electronic growls and whatever else he can conjure up with, at a guess, Ableton software soon alerts the listener that here is an amazingly dense track that flourishes when heard through headphones. Take it home, loosen its dancefloor clothes and you'll find that it's wearing a glitchy bra and ambient knickers.

Apologies for that last sentence and to Project Swirl and Licuadora System, whose tracks, though well worth hearing, have been brushed over because I'm about to hit my mental Twitter word limit. It's nothing personal. And despite some rather delicious jazz electric piano, Grau's Miles is, well, miles too long.

Everything apart from the hi-hats in Mikel Mendia's Takumar seems low-passed, giving it a suitably understated feel for Kvindek's last track. I liked the drop about a minute and a half in, where the track comes to a halt only to restart with an echoing snare drum flam and tiny snippets of ...cutlery. Such moments are sprinkled throughout the album. Like a hairy wart anything with hidden depths, Kvindek took time to grow on me. Turn up the volume to let the excellent recording quality shine, give it a few spins and see if the same happens to you.

InoQuo - Kvindek (Various Artists) (link to zipped album & individual files)

InoQuo netlabel

*Ah, mes amis. Le Coupe du Monde. Quel dommage, hein? By the way, if you're wondering about how musicians and netlabels react to getting prodded by CTW's smelly finger, here's a reaction shot from the inoQuo staff (I may be lying about this). Can't you feel the love? CC music: you know it makes sense.

A Nice Bit Of Crackling

...is a rather quaint way of expressing admiration for the female form. It can also be applied to an appreciation of dusty, ambient-tinged trip-hop, such as you'll find in Beats for the Subverted by London turntablist Dustmotes.

The album's liner notes for the ten tracks claim DJ Shadow, Unkle and Portishead as influences. I'm not sure about the last two artists, but the similarity to the soundscape of DJ Shadow's influential Endtroducing is undeniable, particularly in Annica. There are no songs as such: Beats is a mood album, so look elsewhere for dramatic changes of key or tempo. The recurring compositional motif is a slow drum loop backed by an echoing electric/acoustic piano chord. A hissing, crackling sparseness (otherwise known as trip-hop cat-nip) is to the fore so much that sometimes, as in Attrition #2, there's more ambience than actual trip-hop, lending the album depth as well as groove. The white noise, hiss, reverb and vinyl static of the final track, Outro, is something that would more often be found filed under "drone" than "trip-hop".

However, as befits a turntablist's opus, Beats for the Subverted is a platter of relaxing grooves formed mostly of vinyl-based samples caked with overdubbed bass and percussion. In fact, it would be a late-night album par excellence, were it not for the extracts from famous political speeches littered between the mellow breaks, blended piano chords and ever-present vinyl crackles. The vocalists include such young up-and-comers as Winston Churchill and John F. Kennedy. Your MC for my recommended track, Les Main Sales, is none other than Malcolm X. Oh, go on then, have another smooooth track, Animals, complete with a less than cheerful quote from George Orwell's Animal Farm and a surprise guest appearance from SoundCloud's increasingly ubiquitous media player. [Also via CTW's media player. I can multi-task with the best of them.] So, have a crack at Les Mains Sales and Animals and see what you think:

Who knew political subversion could be so cool? Don't tell Fox News about Dustmotes A.K.A. Paul Croker or we'll all be for the high jump.

Ferdowsi features reversed sounds (a favourite technique of Dustmotes, according to the notes), a mystical, Middle Eastern atmosphere and a very American quotation from none other than Ulysses S. Grant. Told you this was subversive. Trust me, if you like Ferdowsi, you'll be in need of more free exotic trip-hop in the form of 1000 Sounds Lotus by The Orientalist.

The chief strength of Dustmotes' album is its atmosphere. Some albums feel artificial and cold; this feels analogue, warm and cosy. For instance, Forewarned's bass plumps pillows rather than pinches posteriors, and its jazz trumpet barely raises more than a mournful wail - yet they're substantial enough to complement the chopped guitar chords and another professional drum beat. You're welcome to explore the remaining tracks and ignore my laziness at not mentioning them.

My thanks to Dustmotes and Public Spaces netlabel for their efforts, but it's time for a caveat. For some unfathomable reason, the tracks on Beats for the Subverted are not available as mp3s. Yes, that's right; you can't get it in the world's most popular audio format. Now, having downloaded and listened to rather a lot of free albums over the years...

*calls therapist on speed dial*

...I'm still amazed at the lengths to which netlabels will go in order to make it awkward for would-be listeners to get hold of, er, you know, the free music. Audiophiles will love the Wav and FLAC options - and normally I'd give a round of applause for such forethought - but most people just want to download and press play, thus making mp3s a necessity. Could PublicSpaces Lab add another download option? Pwetty pweez? The more people who hear the album, the better.

Stop the press! Although PublicSpaces inexplicably don't provide a link, individual mp3 files are available from archive.org here. I'll add the mp3 stream for Les Mains Sales and Animals to my review. Many thanks to @lukelibrarian for living up to his name.

Dustmotes - Beats for the Subverted

@dustmotes - please send him a "thank you" tweet if you liked his scrumptious album.

Public Spaces Lab netlabel