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LABEL PROFILE U-COVER: THE MINIDISC SERIES U-Cover embarked at the start of 2007 on another new sublabel, U-Cover minidisc, dedicated exclusively to release of 3” CDrs, housed in dinky DVD-type cases with thematic full-colour designs. The minidisc series launched, fittingly, with a new release from Ontayso, label owners Koen and Esther’s experimental ambient dub-techno project. Dia de los Muertos is a 20-minute piece that starts out as dissipative dark ambience with dub vapour trails, these eventually conspiring with field recordings and remade and remodelled guitar sustains to make a break for it. Around the 9-minute mark traces of pulse are co-opted, becoming more insistent, the whole then launching into a syncopated take on 4/4 minimal dub techno with fibrillating echo returns making the hypnotic force felt. Dia de los Muertos – Mexico’s celebration of their dear departed - is a suggestive concept for association with Ontayso’s spooked techno shamanism. German E.stonji (Jens Doering), known for his post-Autechrean beat-spatter on Spezial Material (as one half of Hp.Stonji), teams up with singer/songwriter Reejk Lynur (Florian Gebhard) for a blend of indie sing-song and post-rockism (Lynur) shot through with electronic beat crunch (Stonji). The duo’s Light is, truth be told, a bit on the dull side, running a gamut from ambient balladry to digitally-enhanced indie rock stomp, a not that fresh take on an old genre-merging recipe which doesn’t get beyond half-baked. Murray Fisher, one of Boltfish’s head honchoes, makes his Mint out of a combination of grandiose arrangements and twinkling melodies, rendered modish by electro-pebbledashing with clicks’n’pops. Opener and title track, “Chasing Shadows”, is an affair of film theme grandeur whose rousing “Chariots of Fire” melody worms its way insidiously into the head. “Heart Shaped” is a moodier entity, while “Vighurs” is positively noir by comparison. In between, “A Figure On Horseback” has a busy buzz of orthodox IDM melancholia about it. Overall, though, Fisher’s conservatism sees him comfily toying with the sonic architecture of soundtrack composition rather than riding the wild frontier of electronica’s Cutting Edge. Put on Ylid’s Simple City Dress and you’ll find a melding of acoustica and electronica upon you. Rob Lyon is one of a bunch of cuddly Static Caravan/Cactus Island new electronica types, here seemingly accentuating all that emotional delicacy and beauty of sadness kind of thing. “Blow Blow Blow I Try” pulls out all the string stops with an intimate piano being joined by massed cellos and violins in an assault on the heartstrings, before beats lose all restraint too and go off skittering wildly. “White Wood” is a final lone piano étude that bespeaks someone in the throes of something more than a sulk. Songs for the lost and the lonely. Cheju, nom du disque of Boltfish co-head Wil Bolton, steps up with a mixture of warm synth tones, crunchy broken beats, and layered atmospheric textures that’s frankly a U-Cover shoo-in. He spreads five slivers of crafted melodic electronica across Foil. Its mix of smooth strings, chiming keyboards, and whistle-worthy melodies slips down nice and easy. A bit too easy in fact. There’s an air of workmanlike bedroom craftsmanship, but Foil., more so than other albums Bolton’s been behind, tends to err on the side of blandly pretty melodics and rhythms that are more decorative than genuinely kinetic. Somni451 was David Mitchell’s slave robot from the novel “Cloud Atlas”, which also provides the title for this release by Belgian Bernard Zwijzen. His brand of minimal electronica is not the most individually voiced but certainly does the atmospheric trick expertly. Three meditative pieces named after different cloud varieties are proposed: “Cumulonimbus”, a looping piece with a recursive bleep, far-off drone-slivers and subtle background crepitations whose warm-cold amniotic aspect recalls Biosphere’s work. “Nimbostratus”, nebulous billowings and bell-like tintinabulations that are a dead ringer for the serener end of Shuttle 358’s soundscapes. And “Altocumulus” ends one of the best of the minidisc series all billowing pillows inviting immersion. Iridescent. -Scaldis- (Belgians Jef Aerts and Maarten Voeten) move away from their previous U-Cover cd-r incarnation as somewhat generic IDM groove-bite practitioners to propose an ambitious 20-minute piece composed of layered synths, field recordings and sparse rhythms. Shorter Days is a great swathe of spatial ambience starting out in underwater-cum-outerspace regions exploring a moodfield between the glazed and the spooked with plenty of timbral interest. Enter a series of less abstract drifting chordal sustains with bell-like overtones, heightened by reverb/delay. Click-pop-hiss and the fuzz-scuzz of environmental samples then make their presence more felt, while the synths continue their arc and light drone weavings. Clip-clop sounds cohere into a lo-fi beat, further thudded into by heavy electronic rhythmix and massive sub-bass prods. The whole piece has by now morphed into apiece of toytronic cyberfunk, before losing the beats to dwell by the BoC-side in Christ.-ian wibbling analoguery, and returning to base. Quite a trip. Behind the unwieldy Entia Non moniker lies Australian James McDougall, whose Zero comma zero is the most experimental recording of the series. Rather than “music”, much of it is nearer to sound design or even radio-drama concrčte, McDougall making freeplay of polymorphous sources - samples, recorded media, shortwave radio, contact microphones, field recordings, vsti plug-ins, toy instruments, to name but several. His aim “to explore possibilities, to seek what is interesting in sound and to be free of any limitations” proves to be true, as what ensues is an eventful and detailed ambient soundswim, like bathing in waters in which various items float, not all of which you feel entirely comfy with. In fact the first track “Uncommodious” titularly trails its demeanour. “Buried under Tomes” is infused with a hefty charge of welcome harmonic matter though, and “Plein Air”, with its billows of cascading tuned air, could be a “dirtier” less minimal 12k, edging towards the semi-harmonized environmentalism of and/OAR. Teeming. Japanese duo Yoshinori Yamazaki and Kenichi Oka aka Yamaoka deliver a third U-Cover release mainly deploying synthesis and samples, threaded through with environmental recordings captured in the extreme north of Japan. On “Inter” a massively arpeggiating analogue synth cycles across the whole thing. On “Trail” some Paris Texas slide ripples out before clouds of analogue synths and wisps of white noise create an imaginary film soundtrack. “Fa2” plays host to a kind weird gamelan, before pirouetting marimba-like bleepings dance echoing and rippling as a jetplane whooshes over, ending underpinned by analogue synth drones and a sudden dramatic piano motif. Episodic, filmic, big on atmosphere. The second Ontayso in the minidisc series, Blackout, hosts two tracks of grubby underworld ambience. A headachier paranoid relative of Basic Channel clearly conspired with Scanner to conceive the longest piece “Nineoneone”, as eighteen minutes of dubby, flickering atmospherics stalked by muffled arrythmic bass prods are overlaid with radio-comms effluvia and spectral delay dregs, attenuated synth arpeggiation serving to provide something solid and dynamic to hang on to. On the following “Blackout” the scanned transmissions, initially clearer than before, are erased by the developing percussive clutter and syncopated bass crawl for a faintly troubling piece of atmospheric dub-noir. Paranoid technoid. Joel Tammik, Estonia’s answer to Valdislav Delay on previous U-Cover releases (see esp. Eluline), reveals further hidden depths on Matte, as the already given enviro-crackle and sea-bed dredgings are ploughed through, this time with his sampler on Ninja Tune funky drummer setting. Initially, cascading washes of steely vapours open “Eile” like he’s up for election as the local Pub, but it turns out to be a red herring, as Tammik unexpectedly wheels back in this downtempo headnod drummer for some hazy hip-hop derivative, still glazed with teeming vapor trails from the opening. “Pealinn” is a broken beat behemoth threaded through with hammond organ smears and noirish samples, not to mention an ill inclination. “Reede” reveals that all along Matte was his bid to be Ambient Electronica’s DJ Shadow, with Mo Whacks (on drums), spaced out washes and synth squelch being sucked into a grainy soup. The package is sealed by a jigging jivetrance swampdub (it’ll make sense when you hear it) treatment of “Eile” courtesy of the ever-willing Ontayso. Joseph Auer delivers a more than a little Detroit-tinged offering of analogue vibey melodic techno-cum-IDM. Co-founder, in fact, of Rednetic, Auer is a man with previous form –notably a more generically Detroit techno premised offering on Boltfish. Late Night Mechanical Music contains four instalments of retro-futurist electro glide in blue, all twilight reverb-drenched keys, the regrettably title opener “Doncha-wanna” and following “Point” bedded down on thick slow-mo beats, while “Curvature “Ambient Mix)” rides on a more upbeat soft techno undercarriage. “Minimal III” curiously breaks the dark blue moods of the foregoing with a thump-happy gatecrasher to disrupt hitherto uber-cool downtempo proceedings. Japanese artist Takahiro Yorifuji aka Hakobune proposes a collection of serene ambient with just a glimpse of of early-Kranky space rock vistas. “What It Meant Before” recalls Windy and Carl and “The July Skies Followed Us Here” gestures towards early Stars of the Lid, minus that duo’s happy-making tape hiss. Gently manipulated guitar drones that hover and oscillate, approaching a sense of textural space that’s also been mined by some of the lighter work of US guitar-shapeshifter Jeff Pearce. While spreading his tonefloat far and wide across these tracks, Hakobune maintains a delicate minimalism of approach based on one or two simple guitar lines, albeit drawn out into long rays. The third Ontayso minidisc release finds them on planetary exploration duties once more. Red Planet Data is 24 minutes of hypnotic throbscape, with trademark dubbed-out smears and that by now familar Ontayso syncopated pulse that nods at Basic Channel/Chain Reaction but refuses to get its kicks on route 4/4 (this goes via some obscure sideroad called 13/8). Further atmospherics come in the form of metallic stabs and attenuated wisps of chordal matter sluicing around in a spacey brew which blends in periodic insertions of NASA communication samples. Trance mission accomplished. Mark Streatfield, another veteran of the Boltfish-Rednetic stable, is behind Zainetica, whose Cambridge Heath is populated by a mix of lush analogue chordwash, wistful melodies, and electro-coloured downtempo grooves. The whole is at times not far removed from the feel and mood of Christ.’s last Benbecula emission – perhaps less of a woozy and more vibey mood, but on the whole imbued with a similar sense of sound popular electronic craftsmanship. It’s over three years since Insanic4’s debut album appeared on the U-Cover CDr sub-label. His 4-tracker Neglected Particles is a perfectly workmanlike follow-up of lowlight IDM by numbers. Experienced IDM-ers might be distracted into playing spot-the-influence as they listen. A crafted collection, albeit not one to quicken the pulse, “Obsolence” being somewhat on the Lackluster side, while “Ice Queen” might serve as a decent stand-in for those who miss the electronic ballads of the old Expanding sound (think Benge). “Tek Loden” meanwhile is so Arovane he probably thinks this song is about him (or at least his Lilies). Synthetic mimetics. Following contributions to an early compilation in U-Cover ’s cd-r series and several low profile releases on Hidden Records, old skool-revisiting revisionists Dutch duo INKlings delivers three depth-charged tracks of dark and dangerous analog workouts. Hermetica rolls out a heaving mix of grainy ambient, deep space bass pulse, acidic 303 squelch and fattened up beatbox groovage. Here a few Drexciyan traces and there a touch of downtempo Plastikmania combine with an infusion of Namlookian synth swathes, successfully drawing a line from 80’s electro, 90s ambient and idm, and stretching the sound into the ’00s. This last, then, is the most recent in a strong series of desirable miniatures from the estimable U-Cover , a label whose prolificity should not be linked with any lack of attention to quality control. Get collecting. ALAN LOCKETT • www.u-cover.com |
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