Electro Recommendations June 2014

Review: Phran is a brand new recording artist based out of Barcelona and Venezuela, his debut EP for Klasse Wrecks is a fantastic and blistering trip into live hardware session jams. Buzzing with electricity and fuzz the 'Bad Format' EP is an impressive debut from the young artist and sure to please fans of both traditional Electro and forward thinking House. Alongside the four originals we have a remix from up and coming Belgian producer, Innershades. Innershades recently impressed music lovers with his very well-received 'Nina In The Boiler Room' track which was released via Creme and has turned in an effective interpretation in what is soon becoming a recognizable style from the young producer.

Review: Black Narcissus originally debuted on the Signals label last year with the excellent Black Narcissus X mini album, and whilst the identity of the producer was kept a secret beyond the suggestion that it was the work of a sometime Rephlex artist, it has subsequently been revealed to be the work of Jodey Kendrick, whose electro-focused music has appeared under various guises on the label founded by Richard D. James, and on the affiliated Electric Dance Music. Varla is Kendrick's debut album under the Black Narcissus guise and as the artwork suggests it takes its name from the lead character of Russ Meyer's '60s exploitation flick Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, and musically it's as frantic and occasionally as brutal as the music of electro deities Drexciya.

Review: The snappily titled World Electronix Remixes 12? does what it says on the tin, presenting remixes of tracks from the World Electronix series that Cultivated Electronix ran across four 12"s over the course of a year. Within this series, Shad T. Scott, JTC, Gerard Hanson, The Exaltics and Boris 'Versalife' Bunnik were amongst the names that contributed to each loosely themed record, it dark, acidic, deep or twisted electro. Naturally the artists that feature on this 12" are of a similar calibre with French electro royalty The Hacker casting his shadow over Finnish pair Morphology, The Exaltics rewired by label boss Sync 24, and Marco Bernardi taking on Sync 24?s collaboration with Abstract Forms boss Dais. However, it's the playful analogue insouciance that is DMX Krew's adjustment of "In Transit" by JTC that makes this record that extra bit special.

Review: Previously presented as the 808 Box, Fundamentals continue their super-limited collectivist spirit with the 808 Bag. Comprising over 40 examples of contemporary electro, from artists as diverse as Hadamard and Scape One, the whole package is curated and created with serious care and attention. Spread across eight EPs, expect to be massaged by the icy synth fingers of Dpo's "Mitosis", expect to do some serious body popping to Classic Decay's "Lumiers Dans La Nuit" and anticipate some serious dark audio deviance on Solvent's "Light & Lens". Limited to only 80 copies, tributes to the most important machine in electronic music don't come much more exciting or exclusive than this!

Review: The final installment of Tim Hirst's two-part release with Rush Hour's No 'Label' operation as Design A Wave proves to be every bit resistant to easy definition as last week's debut 12". Given that Hirst has previously collaborated with Heatsick and released the under-valued Live On Your Yard LP on Luke Younger's Alter a few years back, this shouldn't be a surprise in the least. Fans of Stephen Warwick's extended Casio jams will actually resonant with some of the sounds here, which veer from a squat punk funk disco shuffle on opening track "Neanderthal Nyquist" to lopsided, malfunctioning electro with "Movie Of Helipad". "Auto Resonance Machine" is another overt punk funk number, but it's blessed with synth swirls that are blindingly pretty, whilst "Cerebellum" opts for a more pensive, instrumental mood.

Review: The mysterious The Valley and The Mountain project made its debut on Belgium's WeMe label late last year with Black Planet, a seven-track LP that came described only as like "Marvin Gaye and Tangerine Dream together in an elevator in Detroit". Although those expecting soulful vocals might have been disappointed, the brand of electro the project pushes is certainly one situated at the more ambient, kosmische-influenced end of the scale. The outfit make a swift return with Another Portal, where a crisp yet laid-back combination of 808 rhythms and deep melodies come reminiscent of Lifestyles Of The Laptop Cafe, the classic album from the late James Stinson's The Other People Place project - and there is no higher praise than that.

Review: Some two years in the making, the double LP Datafunk Vol 1 compilation from UK label Abstract Forms finally arrives and should be classed under "worth the wait" by anyone with an interest in all strands of electro purism. Datafunk Vol 1 essentially demonstrates how respected Abstract Forms are as a label within the electro community with new and exclusive contributions from such luminaries as DJ Stingray, DMX Krew, mystery Bunker entity Shemale, Further Records Rotterdam correspondent Ian Martin and Andreas Gehm's Elec Pt 1 project. Don't skip on the lesser known names such as Das Mooster or Obergman however as their productions help lend Datafunk Vol 1 a sense of cohesion, with "Cycloaddition" from the unheralded Linear Synthesis a notable highlight. If Abstract Forms want to spend another two years working on a second volume that's fine with us!

Review: Solar One Music founder Robert Witschakowski joining the Clone West Coast series for a triptych of releases as The Exaltics makes perfect sense in the context of his music and the labels he's previously featured on. The Jena-based producer has racked up a healthy discography of albums and 12? releases for a wide variety of underground labels including Bunker, Creme Organization, Panzerkreuz, Abstract Forms, Modal Analysis and Last Known Trajectory. The first six-track installment of the Some Other Place series finds The Exaltics in a more introspective mood than some of his recent dank squat party electro. Cuts such as "It Still Remains" and "Walking Through The Stratosphere" are filled with a sense of hope, though there is still plenty of dancefloor material here - see the delightfully bouncy "Places".

Review: German producer Headnoaks is arguably one of the rising talents in the revivalist 808 electro scene. He's been unfeasibly productive in recent years, offering up a slew of impressive albums via his own Bandcamp page and the ANTIZERO label. Amazingly, this EP for new German imprint Blackred is his first solo outing on wax. Predictably, there's much to enjoy, from the high octane Drexciyan pulse of "Transmitting New System" and woozy sci-fi electronica of "7 Skies" - arguably worth the admission price on its own - to the Kraftwerkian melodies of the decidedly futuristic "Come Home With Me". As "Intro" shows, he's also a dab hand at glacial, stargazing ambience. More, please!

Review: Absent since sharing space with Ali Renault on the Split LP for Bunker back in 2012, the artist known as Q Chip resurfaces in style with Difference That Makes A Difference, a 12" platter for Solar One that continues the label's Elektronische Werke series. Much like last year's inaugural Elektronische Werke release from Frenchman Dynarec, Q Chip uses the series to explore the darker, unhinged end of the electro spectrum across four productions. In Q Chip's world, the future is a place of paranoia and crumbling civilisation, be it the harsh synth lines and snapping 808 rhythms of opening track "Pleasure Anxiety" or the more classicist take on subaqueous electro bounce that permeates the title production and "Sence Data".