Sven Laux – Mud Up, Mud Down

Deep House & Techno, House, IDM, TechHouse, Techno & Detroit // By: simiolioliocloseAuthor: simioliolio Email: simon@netlabelism.com
More Authors Posts (40) // 08/03/2013 // No Comments

This chirpy little number is about as tight as glitchy microhouse can possibly get.

Mud Up, a sweating leather bag of broken paper clips, leaking from the bottom. Squelchy and mischievous. Clicky and clattering, yet soft and bouncy. From a distance, I would guess that it was Akufen, especially the barely audible vocal cuts, enveloped right down to barely a microscopic transient. Intricate, quirky, and intense, with the hihats clambering all over each other, fighting for groove supremacy.

Mud Down, a little darker, perhaps a seething duffle bag of drawing pins. The groove on this track is immense. Skitting and swaying like a cornered fox. It is the sound that 39 atoms make when you get a mic close enough. I like the subtly evolving textures, and the kick drum is so sick. Well, all of the sounds in this release are beautifully clear and edgy. I love the very occasional arrival of the bit crushed snare.

Mud Down (The Coffee Boy ft. Vocal Matador Remix), starts weakly, but finds its feet very well. The offbeat hihat compliments  Sven’s two original tracks; the 808/909 type hihat (and the claps) stick out as a little generic when compared to the original, which incorporates such a finely tuned individuality. Only for a minute or two, as the track builds very wonderfully indeed, and before long had my head moving, quite violently in fact. The crowd samples are crazy; I can’t wait to play this in a club…

Mud Down (Tone Def’s Mud Down and Out Mix), back to the space-glitches, starting with a metronomic hihat. Initially the bass part which arrives is not to my liking; at first, the pentatonic / ‘blues scale’ seems a little out of place as a remix for a track which dives so far into the sonic world and leaves average musicality behind. Perhaps this was the idea, forming some sort of balance. However, the drop in the middle came with a moment of clarity. There is something rather admirable about that weak bassline, which I only noticed when it had gone. As it comes charging back in (very expertly I might add), I was shocked at how much I missed it.

Microhouse? Is it even a genre?! It still perplexes me how this music can possibly fit into music society. Too minimal for a successful club night. Too mind-numbing for an evening listen. Too subtle for casual headphone listening. Too hectic to relax to. Yet there is something quite fantastic about it. Would you agree?

Sven Laux – Mud Up

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rec72 – 5th Anniversary Compilation

Acid, Ambient & Experimental, Broken Beat, Downbeat & Downtempo, Dubstep & Garage, IDM, Instrumental // By: simiolioliocloseAuthor: simioliolio Email: simon@netlabelism.com
More Authors Posts (40) // 21/11/2012 // 1 Comment

Good news. Rec72 is five years old! Quirky, high quality, and eclectic are some good ways of describing the content presented on the newly refurbished website. And what better way of meeting each artist face to face than to download and check out this upfront and personal showcase with 16 specially-made tracks by eight of rec72′s most dedicated contributors.

Rec72 has a fine history. It has always been CC, and has always been a popular netlabel, as far as CC popularity goes. Last.fm states rec72 has just over 7,000 listeners, and 72,000 scrobbles, not bad for an entirely non-profit label run by one person. The owner, the fine gentleman that is Marco Medkour, doesn’t even have a big bright shinning button saying ‘donate’ in big friendly letters, splashed across every page of his netlabel. This is strictly purist Creative Commons. Getting involved, sharing as much as possible, A/V collaborations, etc etc. This is one of the truest examples of a ‘successful’ and popular netlabel, which purely exists for the purpose of creating and sharing.

So, the artists on this compilation: Gripping drones and wild melting melodics from Radio Scotvoid; joyously named Pandacetemol is forced out of his tech-house realm with a delicate acid slow jam and uptempo electro buzz; Nisei23 presents some glorious spine-tingling electroacoustics; Deef continues his chippy and sketchy broken style, which shows some excellent development since the EP reviewed on Netlabelism previously; Lofiuser presents a deep ambient wonder and a lush contrasting industrial experiment; a couple of dazzlingly baffling offerings from Eigenheimer (really impressed with these tracks, ‘Hold Hands…’ is the deepest this compilation goes); Small Colin’s suicide-preventing Scottish trancey chillout; and a couple of peculiar tracks by me (Bitbasic).

A nice quirky feature of the compilation is that each track has the same bpm. Exactly the same bpm. This gives the compilation quite a fantastic continuity and flow from one track to the next. Also considering each track was made from scratch by each contributing artist, it is quite impressive that each one has such a similar angle, considering what could have been submitted. Usually tracks for compilations are carefully chosen from previous releases, but rec72 have shown that they really have established a well-defined sound (a hard task for any netlabel owner). Hopefully people who are new to rec72 will get a lot of pleasure out of this album, and indeed if you are already familiar with the rec72 releases, this will come as a thrilling addition to the already bursting rec72 release list. Roll on the next 5 years! Congratulations Marco!

Eigenheimer – Moodswing Mixtape

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LLLL- Mirror

Ambient & Experimental, Audio, Downbeat & Downtempo, IDM // By: GarrettcloseAuthor: Garrett Email: garrett@netlabelism.com
More Authors Posts (8) // 25/10/2012 // 3 Comments

Tokyo’s LLLL has many qualities to their music that can easily open them up to the American market. In what may seem like an odd amount of recognition for a group who is hardly known even in their own native country, their self-titled debut, which came out just earlier this year, was acknowledged by publications such as The Fader and blogs like No Fear of Pop. That is not the surprising part though.

LLLL, like many contemporaries of American music, has a likening for everything that converges at a point that is post-My Bloody Valentine and low-end beat making. While their songs lean on an electronic format, embracing genres such as downtempo or the brooding, minimalist post-punk synth approach of darkwave, LLLL presents the same ethereal quality that can put them into the category of shoegaze. Enough complex beat programming and deep bass to associate LLLL with the likes of the Los Angeles rhythm scene.

What is the most surprising thing is why LLLL have not gained a larger fanbase. Their self-titled debut was reminiscent of many other modern day gems of music. Choose anything from the discography of Crystal Castles or The XX and you could likely find LLLL placed calmly between the two. But LLLL plays off a bit more obscure than either, and with their second album, Mirror, this is even more apparent. Mirror is everything that their self-titled was not. It’s the perfection of every beautifully abysmal moment of their first record. Like the progression of the aforementioned Crystal Castles and their second record, Crystal Castles II, there is a great leap between the pop sensibilities of their debut record and the deeply disjointed, yet emotionally fulfilling chaos of the second. There is absolutely no hope at all to be heard in Mirror. LLLL plays off as tender and emotional, yet they seem to remain absolutely cryptic and unapproachable. Such a disconnection, however, makes the music all the more meaningful.

Mirror is difficult to follow structurally and melodically and garners a few listens to dig up what is actually there, yet when it hits you, there is a rich complexity about it that makes you wonder how everything was conceived, placed together and was formulated in such a way as to even open up the possibility of vocals, and although those vocals may be whispery and undecipherable, checking off another key element of shoegaze, they show a sense of restrain, hitting only when appropriate. Mirror seems to have been a much more collaborative process than its predecessor, and that sense of harmony is more than evident.

While LLLL’s self-titled album may be much more accessible, it is with Mirror that the band has truly come to realize themselves. It feels like it wasn’t written for any particular audience in mind, rather, it was written to satisfy whatever demons lay dormant in the heart of LLLL, and with the way that Mirror sounds, they’ll have plenty to spill.

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