BTB: Who Wants To Be Healthy In This Sick World?
Boltfish

Like many a Boltfish release, BTB's Who wants to be healthy in this sick world? is a flawlessly crafted collection of gleaming electronic sounds. But Franco Colombo, who's been issuing tracks from his native Buenos Aires, Argentina home base since 2001, brings a welcome degree of grime and grit to the material that isn't as common a Boltfish characteristic. The heavy, cut-throat attack in “Climatic Dot,” for example, proves Colombo 's no wallflower: the slowly unfurling keyboard tones may be textbook Boltfish but the song's clattering groove assuredly isn't. Though Colombo's material generally pairs shimmering keyboard melodies with broken and funk beats in an IDM-related style that suggests a harder-edged Plaid, he's not afraid to mix it up either: a head-nodding lurch pushes “Life To B#” in the direction of instrumental hip-hop, and “Sweet Lysoform” is most certainly a Basic Channel-Chain Reaction tribute.

Though BTB's eight cuts constitute a full-enough meal, the release includes four remixes: Mint's ‘Electrified' version of “Bugree” presses all the right buttons, Milieu's ‘Mushroom Field' hazy treatment of “I Have Diagrams & Mushrooms” brings forth BTB's hip-hop side, and Melodium merges piano and harp sparkle with punchy beats on “Tykua.”

September 2007