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

Scratch Massive: Time
Chateaurouge / Nocturne

On its second album, Time (mastered, incidentally, by Rhythm & Sound's Moritz von Oswald), Scratch Massive's (Parisian duo Maud Geffray and Sebastien Chenut) ‘black electronic' cuts adds New Wave to a potent mix of acid, industrial, electro, and funk. Sometimes resembling Kill Memory Crash in disguise, opening cuts like the throbbing “Fake Lesbian” and burning “Girls on Top” promptly set the bar high. Gravelly male voices, hammering percussion, hornets' nests of synths, and horror-film organs bring dark ambiance to the album's storming electro-house. Highlights include the haunting “Soleil Noir,” so elegant it verges on symphonic, and “Dance,” a slow-burning electro-funk raver. Time's peak moment arrives, though, with “Shining in My Vein,” a spectacularly tripped-out, electro-industrial-funk mix of subterranean bass hum, distorted cyborg vocals, and tight beats (even better is the raunchy guitar motif that crash-lands throughout). But what a shame that Time's quality level drops off in its final three tracks: the anomalously poppy Cure cover “Three Imaginary Boys” sounds like it's been lifted from some other group's album (largely due to Frank Arbaretaz's guest vocal), plus the penultimate “Wagon,” an instrumental beehive of resonant guitar twang and lazy beats, isn't eighteen minutes long but only three, meaning that fifteen minutes of silence separates it from Spirit Catcher's closing mix of “Shining in My Vein,” itself a decent enough version on its own terms but no match for the original. Excise the last three songs and Time weighs in as a near-perfect eight-track mini-album.

April 2007