The cut returns to the blog with selection of new- and re-issued records illustrating vinyl’s timeless quality
AI producers; the ceo of Spotify saying there the artist time is worth nothing; and the general devaluation of the recorded music has had the music industry in a tailspin of late. Is there any point in a record on a platform saturated by the greased palms of well-heeled capitalists?
I believe there is. Even if an artist is putting it out for the sake of pure personal enjoyment, it will always be there. Who needs an audience. And if you want to get very purposeful with it, there is always the vinyl format.
Yes, it endures, and even though we’ve not been as active in singing its praises of late, it remains. In an age where the 2 min song is a trend, informed by social media and you never quite know the extent of human involvement in the artistic endeavour, one thing is for sure; those issues are moot in the context of vinyl.
Nobody is going to invest in anything less than their artist integrity in the format and releasing something on vinyl is an honour that something like the logic of AI will never understand.
So here we are again, back to the format that started it all, this thing called club culture and the place that continues to take pride of place in that culture in Oslo, Filter Musikk. Roland Lifjell and Sverre Brand at Filter Musikk have had their own evolution too, with a new sleek looking website and tons of interesting new and re-issued records coming through the doors. This is the Cut with Filter Musikk.
Larry Heard – 25 Years from Alpha (12″)
Old heads do prevail and it takes an old head to get us back to what we’ve lost sight of along the way. 15 years on from when it was first released Larry Heard injects some Hi-Tech-Soul back into Techno with 25 years from Alpha. The electronic music legend’s record prevails with a sensual touch where elegant melodies float over rocky Electro- and House drum programming.
It’s timeless in the sense that it maintains that Larry Heard appeal that has been there since the 1980’s and has wavered little. As with everything he touches there’s an immersive quality to his soundscapes and driving development where keys seek out new melodies continuously.
Released during a time when we were all rolling in the deep-ness of House, this record would have certainly found an audience on the dance floor back then, but in the context of today it’s very much outlasted its zeitgeist and its timeless quality is only strengthened. It doesn’t matter what era of Larry Heard you land in, the artist’s music is prevalent.
Are you ready for Cybernetic Love? In today’s context, probably not. Casco takes us back to the1980’s where cybernetic love seemed so innocent in the context of an Atari or calculator on your wrist watch. What seems insidious and creepy today, feels charming in the Italo disco producer’s hands back in 1983.
Robotic voices sing sweetly, cutting through the undulating din of chirping synthesisers. In the instrumental version there’s a kind of chip-tune quality to the accompaniment, lending to an otherworldly nature throughout the track. The label, House of Music makes this music attainable again in the vinyl format where classic Italo-Disco records like this one have reached astronomical prices.
Hard-hitting electro galvanising the modern dance floor for the great rewind. Sometimes sounding like it came straight out of the 1980’s when electro was still emerging as its own genre out of a tangent of Hip Hop Bufo Bufo’s Beelzebufo foregoes subtlety for jacking kicks and scratchy samples.
A lot has happened since the birth of electro and Bufo Bufo seems to want to fold in the shared human experience of dance music into the space of this record. Rave, acid and even Jungle sit side by side and every now and then there’s a tinge of balearic sequences rippling through the formidable drum programming.
Klasse Wrecks as a label continues to find these unique characters in the dance music realm with Luca Lozano and Mr. Ho establishing an entire sound for their vision of the dance floor. Bufo Bufo doesn’t break rank for the label’s 49th record and even falls in step with the labels more jagged approach to production. The sleekness we found on the artist’s last two records is hewn on to a rough edge where the beats and samples jut out in jagged
“Lived experiences are transmuted into an amorphous bricolage of pummeled (sic) kicks, synthetic textures, and diaristic details, what they describe as an act of ‘remembrance,’” according to the press-release for this one. That is some “lived experience” Fmvee went through begging the question, are they ok…
“Who do you love” has its serene moments however, a sonic parting of the sea, where the dissonance and glitches are swaddled in a soft blanket of pads and detuning plucks. Rhythmical patterns seem to slip through the artist’s grasp as they dissipate into nonsensical raps, while the melodies just hang onto a thread, before they come apart. An oscillator unravelling into a scribbling sound of uncomfortable incoherence.
Even when Fmvee tries to get it together for “sobbing” at the end of the record, the soulful vocal track is undermined by eerie electronics that pick at the listener’s most inner insecurities and turmoil.
It’s not easy listening, but there is some kind of comfort here in that you won’t feel alone in your despair. Fmvee is clearly going through some shit here on this record and if they can make it through, so can you.
Opening track “departure” is nothing but misleading in name, because this is Skudge doing what it does at its best. The Swedish Techno outfit takes a rare sojourn to Lazy Reflex Complex where they join label head 543ff on a 12” split. When the rest of the world is going harder and faster, Skudge and 543ff keep the record grounded in what would be defined in the trad-Techno realm.
It’s odd calling this style of Techno traditional in any sense, since there is nothing conventional underpinning anything here. Musical theory is reduced to notes that fall between the cracks and rhythms swirl in hypnotic repetition, that rejects the notion of anything like a beginning or end. In 543ff “zoning” it’s hard to find any exit, as you’re being sucked through a whirlpool created by a drum machine, suppressed by an oppressive atmosphere.
After three releases, it’s Lazy Reflex Complex won’t be lured over to anything constituting a trend and with artists like Echelon and now Skudge making an impression on the very young label, it seems they are intent on hitting the reset button on Techno to a point where it was last respectable.