From the Jan 1 – Jan 7, 2004 issue

Music

Beatseaking Missives

by Dave Segal

There are no "bad" years for music, just people who don't know where to find the great shit. While there may not have been any paradigm-shifting albums on the order of Akufen's My Way, there were more than enough excellent releases to keep any music fan in serious debt. Below are merely 20 out of dozens of electronic-music releases that made the last 12 months worth clamping on headphones for.

01 MATMOS: The Civil War (Matador). This is by far the greatest album about military conflict ever recorded by a gay couple. Matmos (and many talented accomplices) use guitars, dobro, bagpipes, violin, tuba, banjo, et cetera, to pay homage to and reinvent old folk and patriotic music. Equally adept with martial paradiddles and software plug-ins, these sonic surrealists brilliantly bridge unlikely styles and eras. Reconstruction, indeed.

02 MATTHEW DEAR: Leave Luck to Heaven (Spectral Sound). After recording stutter-stepping microhouse and mesmerizing minimal techno as Jabberjaw and False, respectively, Dear unveils his inner pop-romantic (and sleepy vocals) on his debut disc under his own name. While maintaining the skewed production techniques that endear him to DJs worldwide, this Detroiter creates technoid songs ("Dog Days" is the club anthem of '03) that split the difference between New Order and Stevie Wonder.

03 RICARDO VILLALOBOS: Alcachofa (Playhouse). Soulful, melodic tech-house doesn't get any better than this. A Chilean-born German DJ/producer, Villalobos has created a sublimely sensual opus that's minimal but oozing warmth. Alcachofa radiates a muted tropical heat and percolates with a rhythmic playfulness rarely heard in today's clubs. Villalobos' tracks typically pass the eight-minute mark, but even that duration seems like a tease when the grooves come this lubricious and the textures so scientific yet chill-inducing.

04 VARIOUS ARTISTS: Superlongevity 3 (Perlon). This German label's Superlongevity series serves as an annual report on microhouse's innovations. Avant-partiers like Villalobos, Dimbiman, Dandy Jack, Jabberjaw, Pantytec, and Narcotic Syntax embroider the genre's venerable 4/4 rhythm with a hard drive's worth of bizarre tones and eerie voices guaranteed to turn dance floors into Fellini film sets.

05 THE RIP OFF ARTIST: In Through the Out Door (Tigerbeat6). The Rip Off Artist--AKA Matt Haines--molds innately "wacky" noises into crazy-angled rhythm puzzles that make you want to twitch like Iggy Pop in a hair shirt. On this disc, Haines revels in his synthetic palette of quirky noises, conjuring a microchipped surrealism that's nuttier than Monty Python animation. Electronic music often comes across all furrow-browed, so Haines' slapstick glitch is a welcome respite.

06 RICHARD DEVINE: Asect:Dsect (Asphodel/Schematic). If you find Autechre's recent output too simplistic and warm, check out Asect:Dsect. This Georgia prodigy abstracts electro into a Tourette's danse macabre, leaving only a recessive gene of booty-bumpin' funk. His beats clack like the dentures of coke-addict auctioneers while moving in meters that'll stump calculus PhDs. Asect:Dsect makes you feel as if you're trapped in a microbial miasma of gurgles, hisses, clanks, and insectoid mandible-chatter. Dude should've scored all the Matrix flicks.

07 TIM HECKER: Radio Amor (Mille Plateaux). Radio Amor recalls the innovative yet gorgeous digital tone-sculpting heard on Oval's 94Diskont and Fennesz' Endless Summer. Hecker further explores the shattered-mosaic principle that informs those two classics while also mirroring My Bloody Valentine's blissful, wombient guitar and keyboard approach. Wielding shortwave-radio gibberish, static, digitally processed pianos and guitars, and reverberant drones like an impressionist painter, Hecker evokes both twinkling poignancy and menacing turbulence in an ebb-and-flow oceanic cycle.

08 THE BOOKS: The Lemon of Pink (Tomlab). This will challenge Matmos' The Civil War for bizarre-hybrid-album-of-the-year award. The Books (guitarist Nick Zammuto and violinist Paul de Jong) have crafted a fractured yet hypnotic indie-pop album, but its busy arrangements and strange juxtapositions lend it a what-the-fuck quality absent from most music of this ilk. Lemon is simply your typical orchestral-hillbilly-folk-pop disc--made with computers--that convinces you original music still lives.

09 ELECTRIC COMPANY: It's Hard to Be a Baby (Tigerbeat6). Brad Laner's probably best known for his guitar heroics with corrosive psych-rockers Medicine. But over the past decade, as Electric Company, he's built a catalog of idiosyncratic electronica that has few peers. Baby marks a new pinnacle of Laner's fusion of rock instrumental wizardry and digital signal processing, exciting you to the infinite possibilities of combining "real" instruments with virtual ones. In the process, he forges a cornucopia of playfully mutated music that recalls late-'70s Kraftwerk, mid-'90s Mouse on Mars, Can, My Bloody Valentine, and even Medicine.

10 EIGHT FROZEN MODULES: The Abduction of Barry (Orthlorng). This is former Furry Things guitarist Ken Gibson's weirdest shit yet, recalling the hellish DSP'd tone thickets of Jamie Lidell and Otto Von Schirach. Gibson upsets your equilibrium with choppy, mulched beats, crunchy/crispy textures, and demonic elf voices. Much of Barry zigzags by like Squarepusher at his most absurdly rapid, but the album's not all madly spastic beat programming and vortex-sucking textures. Gibson also explores the queasier extremes of ambience, taking Aphex Twin's early beatless experiments to even eerier, stygian straits.

CONTENDAHS: THE SOFT PINK TRUTH: Do You Party? (Soundslike); DEADBEAT VS STEPHEN BEAUPRE: It's a Crackhaus Thing (Onitor); KID606: Kill Sound Before Sound Kills You (Ipecac); WARMDESK: Guero Variations (Deluxe); RHYTHM & SOUND: The Versions (Asphodel); BOBBY KARATE: Hot Trips, Cold Returns (Woodson Lateral); CURSE OV DIALECT: Lost in the Real Sky (Mush); OCTAVIUS: Audio Noir (Mush); BEANS: Tomorrow Right Now (Warp); PREFUSE 73: One Word Extinguisher (Warp) DAVE SEGAL

segal@thestranger.com

Buy Tickets for Other Events