From cl Sent Wed, Dec 23rd 1998, 22:10
From cl Sent Wed, Dec 23rd 1998, 22:10
here is a slightly better review- robert merlak-icepick tracks (pthalo08) 11 tracks/56 minutes one of our very own idm members comes through with installment #8 of the pthalo montly series, this one limited to 250. not having heard any tracks from robert, i had no idea what to expect, but i was pleasantly surprised and wished i had put this in a little earlier. track1 - narodna a childlike/circus wheezing organ line over distorted stabs and factory noises. no real "beat" to speak of. pthalo style chaos stays underneath this tune. 2- svirka #1 fat synth lines bounce back and forth using some quirky aphex drips in the back. 3. parna (w/qwerty) some panasonic white noise for a minute or so with lo-fi beats building up slowly. brings back the sound of space invaders as they moved side to side on the atari 2600. 4. asnovna starts with a very distorted vocal sample (maybe) which stays for the duration of the song. heavily washed out synths kick in, almost like a miltary march. after 2 minutes or so, really distorto sub bass kicks in, techno animal comes to mind. 5. radna more metallic and upbeat than the first tracks, keeps one synth line in the background while there is some heavy buzzing in the foreground. wee bit long at 9 minutes. 6. svirka #2 this one kind of plods along. synth lines play over a slow beat that sounds like someone hitting a pvc pipe. 7 emotivna short, but good. has a warm, playful feeling, not unlike a bochum welt/u-ziq track. 8 svemirska(w/qwerty) more ambient, bass throbs and static comes in and out over the top. 9. iceban speeded up horn sample (very uziq) and synth horns make up the bulk of this song with the occasional percussion boucning around. 10. kriva short, more interlude than song. 11 stroga back to ambient-heavy hum of machinery. overall a pretty good effort (especially for a 1st release) i still havent been dissapointed by pthalo yet, but i would have like to seen a little more change in these songs and a little less of point a sounding very much like point b. (i think that works much better for bc/cr material where there is a certain groove they are playing with) for idm material however, that is a turn off for me, no matter who does it. cl ps- lance, are the dynamo 12's you wrote about still in print like the rest of the bc stuff?