(my) recent RA reviews

i've started writing some more RA reviews on a regular basis. here's a pile of recent ones; feel free to read, like, hate, comment, or whatever...

korova - horizontally three solid tracks from korova and NX1, but skirt's groovy, spacey remix is easily my favorite.

earthen sea - mirage a very nice record of what you might call ambient techno, released on ital's label lovers rock. warm, melancholy, introspective sounds, spread out across fifty total minutes. highly recommended.

valanx - ejecta remixes four strange, experimental techno tracks turned into... four strange experimental tracks, but the results are actually pretty interesting, and at least wide-ranging.

deepchord - luxury more smooth, warm, heady strands of techno from rod modell.

draag - occulted hard-hitting dj tools, enough said.

Ø - konstellaatio i was quite happy to get to review this album, which is already become a favorite for the year - it shows mika vainio diving further and further into darkly contemplative realms of experimental ambient music.

rick wade - sweet life decent stuff from a longtime purveyor of deep analog house. "the chateau" is the jam.

lakker - containing a thousand mostly more tricky, broken-beat techno from this duo, but i'll say "mausoleum"'s slow, druggy swagger makes that one my favorite.

... and you can find the whole archive of my editorial writing for RA here. look out for more soon!

monday moods: rod modell - cloud over

hello again! yes i'm still around, i've just been a bit distracted. anyway, here's another edition of monday moods.

i had nice things to say about rod modell's album incense & black light four years ago, when smilecoldanatomy was in its infancy, and since then it's never been far from my speakers. this track, "cloud over", has become a personal favorite over the years - it's so warm, so cozy, so perfectly understated. at least, it's a great soundtrack to this particular monday in chicago. enjoy...



on another note: it was great to meet george, aka slydex, aka kondaktor this weekend. (he flew into chicago to play the DTH three-year anniversary party friday.) face-to-face meetings with artists who have made anatomy mixes are really rare for me, so it was a pleasure to hang out with george for a couple days and confirm that he is, in fact, a great guy. if you're in NYC, montreal and/or mexico city, you should catch him at one of his upcoming gigs on his first tour of the continent. i wish him well on the rest of his trip... also, reese's pieces!

monday moods: deepchord - jeanneau

here's something delicious for early monday moods: "jeanneau," an unreleased free track - available for download in wav quality! - from dub techno purveyor deepchord aka rod modell.

the track comes via soma records, the glasgow label that will release the next deepchord LP sommer later this month. i've already heard sommer and i like it (my favorite track for now is "cruising towards dawn"). i find something to enjoy in just about everything that comes from modell, and the new album is no exception. (some of you might remember the really nice things i had to say a few years ago about modell's incense & black light.)

anyway, about "jeanneau." it's lush, moody, and anchored with deep kicks, and it's just as good as anything on sommer. so good, in fact, that i might just play it this upcoming weekend at varsity allstars... more info on that party later but for now, settle into a groove with an excellent standalone piece from deepchord:

rod modell - incense & black light (2007)

rod modell, a producer with a decade-long output, might be more familiar to the dub-techno enthusiasts out there as an integral member of the shadowy deepchord/echospace collective. while his works under that umbrella of aliases are known mostly for long, 10+ minute dub soundscapes, 2007's incense & black light works well as a journey through shorter tracks. the album evokes feelings similar to the deepchord/echospace sound, but the shorter tracks introduce different moods more frequently, including occasional forays into darker territory - check out the ominous swirls of "red light," as well as "temple," which has an unsettling, mechanical murmur that reminds me of pole's productions.

while it's easy to get lost in the middle of the album, which offers little in the way of percussion (it is either very muffled or nonexistent), it is book-ended properly. opener "aloeswood" sounds like a machine slowly, hesitatingly being started, and the closer "morning again" is an aptly titled, blissed-out conclusion.

the album artwork hints at the origins of this work (it was produced in hong kong) and provides a visual reference - static structures surrounded by blurry, hazy motion - for the music's interplay between reduced but insistent rhythm, and atmosphere. this is a great one for late at night (hence the late hour in which i'm discussing this), and because of its shorter track lengths, i recommend it as an accessible introduction to the world of ambient/dub/techno.