Subterraneans

Ghost Station
Ghost Station
UK CURSED OBJECTS CURS01 LP (2013)

Music inspired by a daily commute on London Underground’s deep-level Central Line but informed by electronic music of the 70s and early 80s. Artist Pete Warren does a great job of conjuring up a subterranean journey beneath London’s upper world. Having never ridden the London Underground I can’t attest to how accurate its portrayal is, but the drum machines and sequencer lines create movement and propulsion and I can feel myself down in the tube. But it’s also a homage to artists like Edgar Froese, early Human League, Nash the Slash, and probably countless others. As they used to say on TV about Beatlemania cover bands “it’s not the real thing but a stunning re-creation.” And here is where I find fault with this album. It’s such a well made imitation of electronic music of the 70s & 80s that it sounds dated and inauthentic. Its a loveletter to the past, where I wish the artist would have put something of his own into it and bring it into the present and kicking into the future.

KAJKYT MAY2014038

Kajkyt
II
AUSTRIA GOD RECORDS GOD 20 2 x LP (2013)

A curious album here by Slododan Kajkut of music for drums (programmed or real, hard to tell since they are very precise and robotic), simple bass lines, blasts of electronic noise, and very detached, intoned vocals, delivered in a chant like cadence. It’s a very dark undertaking. The first track entitled ‘I’ (all eight tracks are merely numbered) presents all of the sonic elements that Kajkut intends to use throughout the album – monotonic beats, thudding bass, monastic vocals of Kajkyt and controlled atonal electronic noise that either floats on top of the mix or overloads into anthemic headbanging blasts. With each succeeding track Kajkut strips the elements away, leaving just the sparsest of beats and bass notes, with silence taking the spotlight while Kajkut whispers verses in Serbian. I find the more denser tracks at the beginning of the album to be the most compelling of the lot and towards the end its enforced rigid minimalism runs out of steam.

MYCOPHAGY

Songs From The Otherworld
Mycophagy
HC3SFHd1 3” CD (2011)

On this home pressed 3″ cdr are twenty-four minutes of what sounds like tibetan bowls and bells imprisoned in ring modulator hell. Its subtitled “drone music for journeying: electronically altered reality.” Listening to this I can liken to observing a vat of molten quicksilver – shimmering patterns of reflected light create temporary metallic surface sculptures that your mind may impose some sort of form upon it as the brain normally strives to do. But it’s all shapeless and there is no development. It just is. And at the end the sounds drain away. Time to take some more mushrooms and start the journey again.