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BEYOND THE VAULT For The Love Of Contemporary Beat Story online since: 23.01.2010 / 19:33:25 .........................................................................................................................................................  Subconscious Communications has always been a special label (as well as a recording studio) for the underground techno trippers and dancers alikes. Its unique history includes names such as cEvin Key, Phil Western, Dwayne R. Goettel, Mark Spybey, Ken Marshall, Edward Ka-Spel, and so on. Since their first release in 1993, they have unleashed two one-time series called From The Vault, including classick albums by Download, Plateau, The Tear Garden and many others. This time around, at the end of 2009, cEvin Key and friends decided to release a first Beyond The Vault series, adding new and as yet unknown artists to the space crew. You can't imagine how excited Subconscious' fanbase became when this was made public. So I immediately pre-ordered my series and waited. After quite some time, let's say I was getting rather impatient for the Beyond starship to come at my appartment's door. Many days and nights were spent anguished by the idea of my treasure having been lost (or stealed) somewhere in the post office's basements. So I waited and waited and waited, until one day the package arrived, totalising 7 new cds + a free album of my choice from the label. It was a dream come true, a life's fantasy accomplished under my very eyes and melting brain. Who in the world would I be, with this Beyond The Vault music migrating into my c-o-r-e? Not thinking, I laid down, headphones on my ears, and gradually let it go to the sounds themselves. My impressions of the music will be exposed below. As you will see, the imagery conceived and created for the digisleeves by visual artist Simon Paul is nothing short of extraordinary.  It's never really been official as to who was behind bananaSLOTH. Much speculation piled into piles of piles of more and more speculation, until the very day I heard the album! SURPRISE, it's been clear to me that this is ceVin Key's fourth solo output ever since. Right after the intro of high noise modulations and abstract sound paintings, DINOSAURS WILL EAT YOUR BRAIN! DINOSAURS WILL EAT YOUR BRAIN! And one hell of an album takes off, my friend, far into ceVin Key's IDM'zed techno zombie styled grooving machine elves. It feels a bit like a sum of his parts, as fans of Puppy, Key, Download and Plateau's Kushbush will find something to enjoy, with an extra edge. It's a very varied album, his most accomplished work since The Ghost of Each Room, as far as I'm concerned. You have the dark, cartoon-gangsterish mid-tempo IDM beat-driven songs, now once in a while spiced with Black/Death metal vocals performed by no one else than Baseck and Otto Von Schirach, among others (?). You have the mesmerizing 4/4 big bass vibrations songs, side by side with the minute details of haunted digitalism, contemporary shamanism and 21st century's THC magick. You have the Sloth's tentacles, bananas and weed all over the place. cEvin Key is a wizard and he conveys elegance, imagination, overfloating energy, demented groove, deconstruction, vibro amplitude, mindfog starlight... This easily classifies as one of my favorites from the Beyond the Vault series. For those who are tired of the IDM, techno scene, and who sadly believe to have heard it all, let the mastermind behind Skinny Puppy, Download, Plateau and Tear Garden slips through your mind and surprise you with something you weren't expecting was still possible to this day. You might even dance and scream. Or communicate with the Sloth's other-dimensional energies. I promise I did. Hail to the Key to the Sloth. - SUB36 - 1. Dinosaurs Will Eat Your Brain 2. Pom Pom Freakashow 3. I Love To Ride The Shinkansen 4. Banana In My Brain / Tokyo Decadence Mix 5. Monster (The Meeting Of) 6. Future 4059 Fun 7. Spaceship 8. Glide 9. The Sound Of The Sloth 10. Beauty 11. Booty Park  Just to keep things straight, this album is a split between Baseck aka Derrick Estrada and Sonic Death Rabbit aka Derrick "Erotic Bean Dip" Estrada and Cristina "Wet Mango" Fuentes, both of them handling their gameboys (LSDJ Sequencer), turntables and occasionally singing. On the first level, all the songs' sounds come from a gameboy, but you would be surprised at everything this duo can do, and at the seriousness of their music. Personally, I only notice slight stylistic changes between Baseck and Sonic Death Rabbit, inasmuch as to consider Creatures to be the creation of two members, not two bands. The music is hard beat-oriented, melodious, now infantile and jumping at your face, then aggressive and breakcore, kind of speedy Punk structured though completely synthetic, with a few vocal contributions including Black metal throating screams as well as more human ones. It's quite experimental and probably like nothing you have heard before. But to be honest, it's my least favorite album from the series. Some parts really do it for me, others don't. One can tell Estrada and Fuentes are unto something genuine but it will need to progress and expand a bit more in order to keep me coming back. Notice that many people disagree with me and love the album, so go find for yourself. Hail to the Ingenious and Youthful Punk Beat Bravery. - SUB37 - 1. S. D. R. - Sonic Deaf Dog Frog-Cat 2. Baseck - All Banged Up 3. S. D. R. - Re-Fried Vs. Black 4. Baseck - It Could Be Worse, You Could Be Human 5. S. D. R. - Playground Royalty 6. Baseck - Wiggidywacadactyl 7. S. D. R. - Dead Rabbit Lullaby 8. Baseck - Rebirthed 9. S. D. R. - Things That Go BRAAAAH! In The Night 10. Baseck - Unhinged 11. S. D. R. - ...Dominator 12. Baseck - Muck 13. S. D. R. - Megathon 14. Baseck - Skybones 15. S. D. R. - They Smell My Fear 16. Baseck - Dodelijk Liefkozen  A newcomer not from Japan, but living in Japan. A newcomer, one should add, with many respected cd-r's under his belt. Although the music he composes is pretty well-known to my radars, I must say that DJOTO, without pushing the limits of IDM, Electro and Beat structures, certainly knows his craft and therefore happens to settle Slow Motion Burn apart from most of his contemporaries. For instance the fact that it is a very rich and varied album, both in terms of its emotional atmosphere and its logical, orderly, and aesthetically coherent relationship of parts. Also, the 'organic' sounds DJOTO uses to construct his buildings of rhythms so to speak, definitely help the music to breath despite the purely abstract technoid synthesis working at its core. If you are strongly interested by structure, rhythmic construction, electronic configuration, cyber architecture, groove through cut abstraction, strong bass levels, subsonic sampling, mathematical vibes, 90's nostalgia and how to make all that work together, then DJOTO might be for you. It has grown on me in many ways, blame it on its classy consistency from beginning to end. Keep your eyes on DJOTO, his name will probably spread in the so-called IDM, D'n'B, Beat and post-Techno circles. With this album, he makes me feel like he's ready to go far into music. Hail to the Engineering Alien Wisdom and its Sacred Beat Empowerment. - SUB38 - 1. Nurse Witch II 2. Cro-Mag Drool 3. Oderus Beast 4. Mosh 5. Rotamsterdam 6. Subway Noir 7. Memory 8. Relationship Therapy 9. Inframan 10. Atatakai  The new downLOAD is CRUNchy, criSPY and FUNky. I would link HElicopTEr with the dark industrial/analog aggressiveness of the early downLOAD noise beat era, the playful, psychedelic and light-hearted IDM/techno of III and Effector, the great dynamics of FiXer + the new analog/mind-bending retro-quality of the bubbling sounds used. Furthermore, Phil Western's Kone albums and some of his solo-under-his-own-name stuff's esoteric signature can be felt in many parts throughout. As a matter of fact, I feel confident this will become a classic downLOAD album, because it has everything the band is appreciated for, from most eras though in a distilled, i.e. purified form. Under the apparent simplicity of the beating structures, however, whenever you follow the inner and outer details, you soon notice the many variations, nuances, textures, main lines, sub lines, types of beat per minutes, sismic oscillations, splashing bursts, distanced voices, echoes of echoes of echoes, etc. The band admitted to the fact that it is a highly improvisational album, the closest we could get to a live electronics jam from the legendary duo of Phil Western and cEvin Key. I say mission accomplished. A special mention goes to Mark Spybey's presence on the dreamy and subconscious Beati, one of the most beautiful compositions from the band's (almost) original lineup. Very experi-'mental' shit, it's already one of my favorite downLOAD album! Many critical individuals have complained about the loud and apparently pounding beat nature of HElicopTEr's intense music. Well, I say, if you don't like loud, intense and pounding beat, why are you listening to downLOAD anyway? Hail to the Bubbling Psychedelism of Nuclear Fusion Groove. - SUB39 - 1. Propeller 2.Bell 47 3. Hut 4. Decadance 5. Lift 6. Message From Gort 7. Radio Silence 8. Pilots Requiem 9. Landed 10. Beati  AGM Alert! AGM Alert! This is hot and steamy. Master in weirdness par excellence, Otto Von Schirach definitely is an international music oddball. No one can truly qualify his meaning within contemporary music, because he is unlike everything else. I discovered him live in 2004 when he opened for Skinny Puppy. If you have never heard his name before, let me humbly try to explain what his music sounds like to me. Gross, crass, perverted, clownesque, maniacal, naughty, squealing, inverted, horrific, pornographic, coarse, nauseating, ejaculating, over the edge, monkey-mongoloid and bad ass gansgta Hip hop, transgender Techno, Miami bass revival, midnight-creepy-circus Orchestra, crackpot head Disco Thrash, Black metal deconstructionism, Electro speed espousal, Madfuck balls tripping, pseudo-retro-pedro Futurism, laser beam Symphonies, serial killer Opera, including literally hundreds of types of vocal experimentations, ranging from rapping to screaming to rasping to growling to speaking like alien kids to sniffing to laughing to croonesque insanity. Magic Triangle IS out there. May be hard to get into at first sight; rewarded will be those who don't mind not only Otto's aesthetically vulgar grotesquerie, but also his genre-defying music. Or as he puts it himself, "Otto's latest offering to the alien angels of the planet audio has succeeded in channelling those saints of sound to father an album more accurately described as a collection of ritualistic extraterrestrial chants." Hail to the Bermuda Triangle and its Countless Music Catastrophes. - SUB40 - 1. Aliens Visiting Me 2. End Of The World 3. March Of The Dead 4. Zombies 5. Death Print 6. Mother Fucking Punk 7. Condom Pancakes 8. Eye Of Eight 9. Strange Visitor From Another Planet 10. Homosexual Mannequin 11. Anal Spaghetti 12. My Supernatural Motorcycle Gang Will Knife You 13. Night Terror 14. March Of The Dead Instrumental 15. Zombies Bonus Beats  The new platEAU exhales and invokes perfumes, smoke, exotic cocktails, LSD-distortionism and futurism, intergalactic dancing clubs and space cafés. And of course the BEAT-Overlord - namely platEAU's new level of electro space groove. Yet again, Phil Western and cEvin Key are masters at developping momentum, catchiness and rythmical layering in a genre so often trapped in its own rules. The music has a strong affiliation with phat, analog, bouncing, trippy space techno. Saluting Chicago and Berlin from outer space, Gort Spacebar is repetitive, submarinesque, warmly, aquatiquely alien, extra-organic, meta-mutant, and it takes its time to evolve in tones and layers, grooves and tempos, both dense and subatomic, most of the songs getting hypnotic and cosmic with your sonar imagination half into the album. In the well-known tradition of all platEAU's past albums, it is recommended to smoke more than moderate quantities of either marijuana or hashish before discovering Gort Spacebar. Best environment for listening: in the dark, in the nude, with glowsticks in between each of your toes, slowly making love to the beat per minute. No seriously, to summarize my appreciation, I would say that this new incarnation follows where Kushbush had left, though it visits styles which had not been explored as such on any other previous platEAU album. It's not a whole new 'ego' for the band but it's a different beast altogether. More cosmic and spaced-out. For some unknown reason, I feel like I prefer it to HElicopTEr. Indeed, by maintaining the high energy levels of early noise beat experimentation and cross-polarizing it with free tech-groove, Gort Spacebar riddles the future of techno music. Hail to the Fluorescent, Extraterrestrial and Biochemical Beat Lines. - SUB41 - 1. Gort 2. Gimp 3. Space Cafe 4. Mole Twitch 5. Butterface 6. Percolator 7. Aliens 8. Drift 9. 3am  Tear Garden, the romantic exception from the lot, composed of Edward Ka-Spel and cEvin Key, returns with their most consistent album in years, not to say their most bizarre. Strongly rooted in psychedelic Dubstep, exotic Beat, symphonic drones and highly emotional, layered, textured and soothing ambient 'rock' foundations, Have a Nice Trip unfolds over its more than 75 minutes duration a mesmerizing and otherworldly storytelling mindtrip into the various depths of contemporary electronic music. It seems like each of the songs enter into and sink out of each others effortlessly, in spite of the singular amount of styles explored by the duo. For instance, discogs.com quotes Electronic, Pop, Rock, Industrial, Abstract, Drone, IDM, Psychedelic Rock, Electro, Experimental, to which I would add, influenced by Ka-Spel's revelations, what I dare could only name the sunraesque eeriness which the music seems to often evaporate into. The vocals, of course, are downright heartfelt and sometimes spooky weird. Vibrating in e-motion, always in perfect symbiosis with the music's micro and macro textures, Ka-Spel 'visits' the album the way we visit our dreams. Personally, I consider him to be a shaman of the heart. Don't be fooled by my descriptions, in no way can the album be considered as a comeback to the band's previous partly instrumental recordings, an early style which was explored up to Crystal Mass. Quite the opposite. However, elements from the past will be easily recognizable for long-time fans. This sounds therefore more like a further continuation from The Secret Experiment, even though as a whole it appears to be less chaotic and more distinguished, so to speak, than its predecessor. Which in turn is what links it to Tear Garden's glorious past. This is an imaginary voyage for the daring psychonauts who want to mind travel where there's nowhere to land. Hail to the Psychedelic Exploration of Dub Core Fantasy. - SUB42 - 1. Made In China Part 1 2. Made In China Part 2 3. Lonesome Tonight 4. Figures In The Mist 5. Palm Sunday 6. Horace The Diaper 7. Nothing's Set In Stone 8. Spare A Dime 9. Natural Selection 10. Nowhere To Land 11. Blazing Cathedrals 12. Have A Nice Trip * * * www.subconsciousrecords.com www.scaremeister.com www.myspace.com/bananasloth www.myspace.com/baseck www.myspace.com/sonicdeathrabbit www.djoto.com www.myspace.com/downloadfans www.ottovonschirach.com www.myspace.com/listen2plateau www.brainwashed.com/lpd www.myspace.com/philwestern * * *  Oliver Side |
