From Simon Paul Sent Thu, Oct 8th 1998, 00:48
From Simon Paul Sent Thu, Oct 8th 1998, 00:48
I thought we banned all reviews...........DJ Spooky's album is brill...like all the rest..buy it.. spaul Sam Frank wrote: > These are a few reviews I wrote for my school paper. Sorry for yet another review of Burger/Ink, but I did the review 2 weeks ago, and I've forgotten to send it on to the list. And (plug) to any labels out there, I have freedom to review whatever I like for my newspaper, plus i'm writing reviews for a music magazine, so feel free to, um, send me promos, no matter how obscure you are(end plug). Now I'll stop talking shit about how I like my reviews, and give you my own to tear apart... > > Sam > > DJ Spooky: Riddim Warfare > (Note... This still has to be run by the editors, so it'll be tightened up a bit in its final form) > > "Fuck art. Let's dance!" For once, DJ Spooky must have been listening to his critics with one ear. His new album, Riddim Warfare, isn't the art soup of his past efforts. Instead, on his major label debut, he makes a new attempt to recreate the energy and creativity of his live DJing. > Spooky wants desperately to be unclassifiable, to, in his words, "paint with fragments of memory." But in his attempt to do so, he's given himself away as a bit of a fraud. Spooky wants to be avant garde, so he recruits Thurston Moore to play guitar fuzz. He wants to be jazz, so he plays some nondescript walking bass with a live band. He wants to be pop, so he samples Puff Daddy and Sublime without a hint of irony. He tries to paint a postmodern, dystopic world, filled with "ethnic digestion tabernacles," and smart bombs from Space Invaders, but he just comes off as an inane retro-futurist. > Spooky's attempt to create such a world is all well and good, except that it seems like he's playing lip service to his influences, even when the experiment succeeds as with Moore. No matter how much Spooky talks, one track each of limp jazz, dub, and Muzak just aren't very convincing. In fact, it seems like Spooky only cares about understanding 3 things: hiphop, art, and drum and bass. He works the hardest at hiphop, recruiting various underground rappers to rhyme about space, technology, and futuristic spirituality. However, with the notable exception of Kool Keith, their lyrics amount to little more than big words and hot air. Spooky's production doesn't help matters any, replacing the tight minimalism of a DJ Premier with an overload of distracting sounds and subpar beats. > Spooky also takes his art seriously, and it threatens to kill the album. He talks a lot between songs, and most of it is completely insufferable. One would hope he realizes the listener doesn't care about the politics of "the mix," or that this is "cassette as theater piece." > What redeems Riddim Warfare is the way Spooky creates a new urban dance music, layering insane noise breakbeats with scratches, sirens, and other dark signifiers of decay. It shows that when he cuts away the bullshit, he can really rock a party. His collaboration with Kool Keith on "Riddim Warfare" is stunning, a signpost pointing towards a new fusion of drum and bass and hiphop. But there just isn't enough of this unpretentious side of Spooky to justify his ever-present self indulgence. > > Burger/Ink Las vegas > Matador Records: America's preeminent indie-pop label? Quite possibly. Stuck in a rut? Most definitely. > The folks at Matador have been trying to snap themselves out of it for a while now, and without much success--releasing albums by Liz Phair With A Drum Machine (Solex) and the Japanese Beck (Cornelius). With the recent release of Las Vegas by Burger/Ink (Jeorg and Mike, respectively), an album as indie and pop as anything Yo La Tengo ever made, the Matador bunch have reestablished themselves as a truly forward-thinking label. > Burger and Ink are no Chemical Brothers. Instead of hitting you over the head with a meathead breakbeat and a cheesy sample, music so overblown and underthought that it's boring after a minute, they explore the hypnotic power of maximal minimalism, beautiful repetition, and stasis in motion. In the April 1998 issue of Spin, Simon Reynolds called this new sound of Berlin techno "heroin house." And with beats layered deep down in the soup of texture--dubbed out á la King Tubby--electronic whirrs mutate imperceptibly yet inescapably. > Las Vegas is not on the same level of abstraction as Pole's recent and brilliant release CD1/LP1, an album that sounds like a killer dub of Oval's computer hiccups. Instead, it deals in recognizable beats and multiple layers which fade in and out so gradually that you hardly notice the shifts. Or rather, you don't notice until you leave the room for a minute and return to find that everything has changed: new melodies have dropped in, muffled handclaps have replaced a shuffling maraca. Sometimes the sounds blend, sometimes they separate, but they always seduce, making for supreme headphone listening. > Las Vegas embodies the oxymoron "dance music you can't dance to." It's too lazy, too melodic. Echo and reverb transform the album's texture, and the occasional human touch sounds a reminder of the real world outside; the individual sound of a guitar, horn, or bell adds even more melancholy into the mix. > Each element Burger and Ink stir into Las Vegas becomes part of the larger picture. That picture is one of the most beautifully holistic statements techno has made in a very long while. (Matador)