From s.f.w.d. Sent Wed, Oct 28th 1998, 09:18
v/a - altered states of america (lo recordings) an older title (97) with a fairly impressive group of artists (all n. amer= ican, hence the title?) includes solvent, lowfish, microstudio, matmos, lesser, space wurm, david kristian, etc... representing labels like suction, vinylcomm, drop beat, carpet bomb, etc. basically a good show of some of the top electronic/idm stuff coming out of the us. one thing which is pretty consistent throughout the comp though is the abrassive_noise_factor (something that there seems to be alot of these days) experimentation, but its really nice. do be mistakened, there are some great not-as-noisy-tracks (noisy being material like the lesser and 8 frozen modules tracks)... the kristian track very nice, the kundalini was pretty funky and had some nice sweet melodies going on, the Microstudio track grabbed much attention on its own last year on the list... nice comp all around and definately worth picking up to try on some of the artists... don't think anything is exclusive... matmos: quasi-objects (vague terrain) had some of the samples been different, this might have been a pretty funky release... still is, just more odd than funky. each song is made up from specific samples. track one : ballons, whoopie cushion, synth. track three : human voices track six : the human body track seven : 'all sounds generated by manipulating a stretched latex t-shirt'. what might be passed off as novelty samples is extended to outright experimentation with the 'silent recordings' samples used on track four... beyond that, matmos use the samples effectively to create a variety of sounds and grooves and atmospheres which are simply must have imo.... more coming sooner than later xxxx@xxxxx.xxx icq_12645306 http://www.sonic.net/~brap/ coming sooner than later: sfwd0004 - pre-mil=B7len=B7ni=B7um soundscapes 12" our future has never been so frightening: http://williamshatner.com/