ARTICLES
Benoît Pioulard's Précis
Label: Dynamophone
Label: Hidden Shoal

ALBUMS
Aemae
A Lily
Arc Lab
Blotnik Brothers
Gui Boratto
Cagesan
Jeremy Caulfield
Loren Dent
Do Make Say Think
Eats Tapes
Enduser
Domink Eulberg
Explosions in the Sky
Michael Fahres
The Field
Frivolous
Maximilian Hecker
Hug
Hush Arbors
Jan-M. Iversen
Espen Jørgensen
Kattoo
O.Lamm
Bruce Levingston
Tobias Lilja
Lusine
Marcia Blaine School
The Missing Ensemble
Nebulo
Ölvis
Charlemagne Palestine
Palomar
Pornopop
The Postmarks
Propergol Y Colargol
The Retail Sectors
R/R Coseboom
Sankt Otten
Scratch Massive
Slow Dancing Society
Stars of the Lid
subtractiveLAD
Sunosis
Aoki Takamasa
Amon Tobin
Tokyo Mask
Kate Wax
Wes Willenbring
Windmill

COMPILATIONS/MIXES
Chaos.Lovers
Cryosphere
Hub: 2004-2005
Rufs
Satoshi Tomiie

3" /7" /10"/12"/EPs
Agnes
AM/PM
Arctic Sunrise
Audion
Characterize 1
Dartriix
Death is Nothing To Fear
Don't Be A Stranger
Einóma
Fusiphorm
Heartthrob
Human Nature
Infant Cycle / Antmanuv
Lilienweiss
Luci
Mauve
Paco Osuna
Ben Parris
Carola Pisaturo
Portable
Sutekh
System
Aoki Takamasa
Cortney Tidwell
Andy Vaz

Audion: Mouth To Mouth Remixes
Spectral

VA: Death is Nothing To Fear
Spectral

When Matthew Dear first introduced the Audion guise, it struck me as a clever if transparent ploy to sidestep strategically the intense media glare brought about by Leave Luck To Heaven. Interestingly, the artistic and commercial success of Suckfish and more recently Mouth To Mouth is now starting to make it feel like Audion has supplanted the Dear persona (a balance which presumably will change again when Leave Luck To Heaven's successor appears). If “I Gave You Away,” Dear's latest Audion missive and the A-side of Spectral's first Death is Nothing to Fear installment (a second 12-inch and mixed CD compilation are scheduled for spring release), isn't quite a barnburner on the order of “Mouth To Mouth,” it's no slouch either. The 12-minute track opens with a bubbly bounce that gets promptly locked into place by snare claps and offbeat hi-hat patterns and then grows progressively vertiginous as wiry melodies build in volume and intensity. When Spectral collects Dear's recent Audion singles into a full-length format (as one presumes it eventually will), the resultant disc should prove to be more than the equal of Suckfish. On the jubilant B side, Pär Grindvik artfully weaves voice snippets into the buoyant techno-funk of “Casio” on his bubbly Spectral debut while Bodycode's “Exciting Ride” showcases once again Alan Abrahams' masterful talent for spinning endless fabulous variations on his slinky tribal-house style. With its braying female voices, “Exciting Ride” could be regarded as Bodycode's take on Deep House, though the tune impresses as much for the ease with which it breezily cruises and for the deft manner by which Abrahams modulates from one layer to the next.

Spectral Sound's latest Audion 12-inch features three “Mouth to Mouth” remixes by M_nus star Heartthrob (Jesse Siminski) and Konrad Black (Wagon Repair, 240 Volts). Siminski weighs in with two jacking versions, his rollicking “Hot Breath Treatment” a wiry, burbling groove-fest that slips and slides in acidic splendour, and his swinging “Mantap Mix” tangentially reminiscent in its machine-based strut of Mantronix or Drexciya. The second Heartthrob mix is the more powerful of the two, an impression bolstered by the synth fireball that detonates early on and a bass rumble so deep it sounds like it escaped from a subterranean mine-shaft. Once Black's nine-minute “Whorenando's “Couch to Couch” Mix” gets its electro groove on, it doesn't look back. By the halfway mark, its rubbery synth-bass slam and insistent chords are beating one into submission no matter how one feels about it. In truth, though the disc is certainly decent enough, none of the makeovers rivals Dear's original. That Death is Nothing to Fear's material is all new also helps make it the more attractive choice.

April 2007

This review also appears in Grooves.