Paradroid/[a]pendics.shuffle: Unclassified Computer Funk
Orac

Orac's got its sights firmly set on a perhaps slightly skewed dance floor with these four classy club tracks. With the bifurcated 12-inch Unclassified Computer Funk, Paradroid (Boogizm crew member Max Wendling) and [a]pendics.shuffle (Ken Gibson aka Eight Frozen Modules) initiate a new series of advanced and experimental dance music for the Seattle-based imprint. On Paradroid's A side, “The Aircrash Bureau” somehow maintains its deep jacking pulse despite being besieged by incessant hailstorms of synth stabs and convulsive flutter while a multitude of whirrs and squelches dances over shimmying grooves in the slowly escalating “Traversable Nodes.” In the [a]pendics.shuffle tracks, Gibson lubricously drools over the technoid bump and electro-swizzles of “Your Rim Job” and follows it with “Torn Feel,” tight machine funk-house prodded by low-slung bass lines and smothered in froggy voice snippets and insect thrum. In the label's own words, “You could call them house, and you could call them techno. Just don't call them minimal.”

August 2005