Monotonik is delighted to present a free, full six-track EP from Holland’s Jasper Boer, aka Jap Jap, in the form of ‘A Resonant Discovery’, including a remix by Dutch artist Morganfish.
The EP consists of varied types of beautifully smooth idm pieces coupled with evolving melodic motifs, which go through different moods: from chillout ambient to more uptempo material.
This showcases Jap Jap’s signature style of solidly produced minimal yet melodic style of dance, which draws inspiration from dreampop, synthpop, postrock and electronica chill out genre artists Ulrich Schnauss and Manual.
The turn-of-the-century London-based Werk label first busted out of the LP ghetto in late 2005, and has since pumped an increasing amount of wherewithal into its compact disc division. It turned out to be a smart move. There’s no arguing with a purist that the sound of a vinyl record will clobber that of an equivalent CD any day of the week, but not everyone owns a phonograph, and digital music-on-the-go is an understandable priority for our generation of go-go-goers. Werk’s recent stable of high quality CD releases put the imprint on the electronica map, first with the warped ragga of Disrupt’s Foundation Bit, then with the wonky dubstep of Zomby’s Where Were U in ‘92?, and finally with Lukid’s Foma, an instrumental hip-hop dream that imagined what would happen if Flying Lotus drank Koushik’s psilocybin Kool-Aid at the pool party by mistake. As dubstep and this stripe of J Dilla-influenced downtempo resurged simultaneously in 2008, Werk became a bellwether almost overnight, its preferred musical trends and preferred medium of distribution the secret recipe for its success.
Hardly an “it” in reality, Werk is the duo of DJ/producers Gavin Weale and Darren J. Cunningham, the latter of whom is also known as Actress. Cunningham had been threatening to release a full-length album of Actress songs after his No Tricks EP in 2004 put a spell on the small clutch of people who heard it and they clamored for more, but notwithstanding some scattered remix work for Alex Smoke and Various Production, it’s only now that fans’ patience has paid off. Cunningham seems to have begun conceptualizing and constructing these songs ever since he closed the lid on No Tricks, which would go to some length to explain why Hazyville isn’t the lazy victory lap Cunningham now deserves to take. Assiduous, adequately deranged, and nicely realized, Hazyvillecarries the weight of a singular record years in the making.
Following in the tradition of Werk albums before it, Hazyville attempts to tackle another genre currently enjoying a renaissance: deep house. The supple, narcotic groove inside tracks like “Doggin’” and “Mincin” reference the sound of a soulful Detroit propagated by Kenny Dixon, Jr. and Theo Parrish, whose back catalogues were exhumed not long ago. As it turns out, though, Actress’s version of deep house isn’t very deep at all. Portishead figured out on Third that, in certain cases, punching up the treble and the compression could invoke feelings of dread and paranoia more effectively than the classic bassy undercurrents employed by groups like Drexciya. Hazyville is a far cry from a horror soundtrack, but its brittle and uncommonly rubbery textures can leave us feeling out of sorts, bewitched and bewildered. It’s a testament to the music that despite the cloud of hype hanging over the record and the hallowed place it holds in the Werk catalogue, it still has a peculiar out-of-nowhere aura about it, the tendency—with its eerie black-and-white cover art as a visual reference—to provoke a reaction of “what is this thing?” in us.
I’m reminded of Boards of Canada’s weird and wonderful Music Has the Right to Children, wherein the melodies lulled us into a daze while the drum programming demanded that we wake the hell up. Hazyville works on two very similar levels. Globs of soothing, static-flecked drone pulsate and worm their way through the bottom of the tracks, and they might have worked as straight ambient were it not for the computer burps and vocal fragments popping sporadically out of the fray like whack-a-moles and the harsh rhythmic cracks that recall a teacher smacking her pointer against the desk. At high volumes, Hazyville becomes downright disciplinary, its stentorian impulses tempered only by the half-lush melodies chilling underneath, and the effect is oddly exhilarating. Not since Third has an electronica record turned punishment into such an appealing—even sexually titillating—sensation through the nature of its sound alone.
It’s of some note that the nature of Hazyville‘s sound doesn’t really change over the course of its 11 (reasonably short) tracks, and after so many repeated listens the experience can move from galvanizing to wearying. Imagine how you’d feel just after being shocked with 200 volts for the tenth time and you’ll get the idea. The song structures also tend to stagnate, with Cunningham repeating bar after bar of music until he decides to stop tape. And it doesn’t take a synaesthete to see thatHazyville lacks color, its tonal palette largely consisting of varying shades of gray. But within this limited framework Actress works magic, andHazyville‘s drawbacks are, if anything, symptomatic only of his considerable focus and how much time and effort we as listeners decide to devote to it. There’s no denying that Cunningham discovered a fascinating texture and a grip of idiosyncratic sonic flourishes and ran with them as far as they could go. “I Can’t Forgive You” sports a rare rhythmic pattern that can only be described as a slurp. The sensual, crackling melody that bulges within “Redit 124” provides a subtle counterpoint to the frequent synth punches as explicit as pelvic thrusts. “Mincin” puts it all together, the drum programming and tuneful elements coalescing into a propulsive and icy-hot groove that Cunningham could have kept playing until kingdom come.
And that’s pretty much all there is to it. Hazyville—less than 45 minutes in length—sticks around just long enough to make its point and bail. It’s a tempting proposition to return to it again and again in order to see through it, understand it more clearly and catch its charms. Therein lies the trap. Hazyville is obfuscated by design—heck, Cunningham gives this away in the album title—and as much as we may believe we can see beyond the triangle on the cover (and hear beyond the music’s surface features), we’re not gonna. So the amount of enjoyment we garner from it could depend as much on how we choose to treat it as it does on the music itself. Taken on its own, however, Hazyville is a clear winner and a fitting analogue for a label that’s always been short on quantity but long on quality...www.popmatters.com
Wide appeal-- even amongst upstart music critics-- isn't something one would expect from this project. When working as Gas in the second half of the 1990s, Voigt's tracks usually featured an unflinching kick-drum pulsing at a mid-tempo BPM-- sometimes ping-ponging across the soundfield or encrusted with burrs of syncopation-- and they typically featured samples of stern and ominous Western classical music. The string and horn drones were sourced from vinyl and proud of it, with the corresponding pops and crackles figuring prominently in the mix. The Gas sound, so distinctive as to be instantly recognizable, seemed somewhat monochrome and tightly focused at the time. It was easy to come away with the idea that the project was an exercise in Fall-like consistency-- "Always different, always the same," as John Peel said about the latter. But it's clear now that each record was its own discrete chamber in Voigt's overall construction. The evidence is here, on this 4xCD box set, which collects the albums proper-- 1996's self-titled record, 1997's Zauberberg, 1999's Königsforst, and 2000'sPop (missing is the 1995 Modern EP as well as a couple of stray tracks)-- into a single set. These records have been out of print for years-- I saw a copy of Zauberberg going for $270 on Amazon not long ago-- but those refusing to pay outlandish prices have been handsomely rewarded. Gas in many ways sounds even more wondrous now, and certainly more wide-ranging.
The self-titled debut, originally released in 1996, is perhaps the most beautiful entry in the catalog. The rich, shimmery drones seem less earth-bound and heavy relative to what would come later; rather than evoking a dense, mossy arboreal feel-- Voigt has frequently acknowledged the sights and sounds of Germany's Black Forest as an inspiration-- Gas brings to mind images of a clear night sky, as pin-pricks of twinkling guitar samples, trails of distortion that swirl like a starry cloud dispersing into the void, and the bassy string tones all meet in a vast open space designed for contemplation. Though Gas is in some ways the most conventional of the project's records, with moments easily relatable to trends in post-acid house ambient, it also marks Voigt as a producer with a rare ear for texture.
The following year's Zauberberg was the solidification of quintessential Gas aesthetic. While overall the darkest and bleakest of these offerings, Zauberberg opens and closes with the deeply spiritual and uplifting organ drones one can imagine leaking from the cracked stained glass windows of a massive cathedral somewhere in the Bavarian Alps. Sandwiched between these drifting moments of blissful surrender are grim meditations on the physicality of tension. The bass drum throbs between the speakers, less a heartbeat than the icy, unremitting march of time, while Voigt's most dissonant string samples tug everything down into the black soil. It's a shopworn observation among Gas observers to say that the music on the individual albums closely mirrors the images record covers, but Zauberberg is as dark and menacing as the noir picture of red branches in darkness featured on its front.
Beginning precisely where Zauberberg leaves off, with rumbling strings and an unblinking kick, Königsforst eventually takes things to a far more complicated place. Where Gas had previously been defined by the sense of endlessness-- insistent repetition, lengthy tracks that could conceivably go on forever, a consistent mood--Königsforst experiments with development, moving through timbres and emotional sensations with a definable dramatic arc. The album looks back and forward simultaneously as Voigt seems to be probing the limits of what the project could be. The same starry backward guitar bit that first appeared on the third track of the debut returns on the fourth track here, now yoked to a subtle double-time kick-drum that gives a sense of blood-rushing excitement. Then the album culminates in the 15-minute fifth track, an Escher-like climb through samples of orchestral horns that change almost imperceptibly with each passing bar, moving from a firm, almost militaristic growl to welcoming, optimistic swoon by the track's end. The beatless drone that closes is another masterpiece, one that hints at massive left-turn to come on 2000's Pop; Königsforst on its own is essentially perfect.
Pop is the best known and most admired of these discs, and it provides an obvious entry point. Which is somewhat ironic, since it's also the most divergent by a huge margin. Had it come out under another name, it would have been difficult to know that this was a Gas record at all. The first three tracks offer three subtly different views of the same sound-field, a warm, wet place populated with bubbles, fizz, and hisses, along with keyboard drones and the sort of basslines Angelo Badalamenti used in "Twin Peaks" to suggest a rural idyll whose dark secrets were yet to be revealed. Had the record continued to explore this one direction, it might have been understood as a contemporary variation on the new age meditation record, something listeners would return to in order to chill out and "center" and so on. But Voigt had something else in mind. By the fourth track he's returned the steady kick to the mix, and braided the percussion with a clanging repetitive bell that one imagines the Field's Axel Willner found inspiring. As the beats disappear for two tracks the album inflates with anxiety and dread until, with the return for the 15-minute closer, we're immersed in one of the most nervous-- bordering on malicious-- Gas tracks of all.
By this point, it seems, Voigt had said what he wanted to say with Gas and was ready to move onto something else, like helping to turn the Kompakt label he runs with Michael Mayer and Jürgen Paape into one of electronic music's premier imprints. Four Gas albums in five years turned out to be quite a lot to chew on; this phase of his career is comparable to Brian Eno's instrumental music between, say, his 1973 collaboration with Robert Fripp, No Pussyfooting, and 1978's Music for Airports. More than anyone since Eno with the exception of Aphex Twin, Wolfgang Voigt was able to reimagine how ambient music could transform space. But he did so in a grounded, accessible manner. There's something primal and intuitive about this stuff; as heady electronic music goes, it's like a loaf of hearty dark bread, an easy-to-grasp but deceptively intricate musical world with a strong sense of-- to stretch the metaphor-- nourishment. Wolfgang Voigt's musical interests have led him to create stark dancefloor minimalism, playful house, and trance-inducing dub-techno; but Gas was the name he gave to music that was foremost about immersive space. This is music you can lose yourself in; see you in four or five hours...www.pitchforkmedia.com
The band notes that due to the extremely short turnaround between today and the release, vinyl will not be ready for a simultaneous release on March 10th. The band is promising "180 gram vinyl and cool deluxe packaging." The album was also described like this:
Mama, I'm Swollen finds Kasher at his literate, lyrical best, where references to both Poe (“Going To Hell”) and Pinocchio (“Donkeys”) are intertwined seamlessly within his own tales of characters grappling with the moral quandary of being human, adult, and playing a role in ‘civilized’ society. Musically, Cursive is as smart and sophisticated as ever, the songs’ rousing, cerebral content complemented by moments alternately hushed and exhilarating (the cathartic “From The Hips,” the noisily melodic romp “I Couldn’t Love You”), eerily moody and jaunty (the almost prayer-like “Let Me Up,” “Mama, I’m Swollen”) – moments that often occur within the very same song.
From the charging bass lines of album opener “In The Now” to the quiet first chords of confessional closer “What Have I Done?”, Mama, I'm Swollen is a natural progression that remains distinctively Cursive: a fluid amalgamation of the band’s sound past, present, and future – a band that both your punk kid sister and English lit grad student best friend can call their own.
