The Quietus office crash landed back in London last week after three days of hefty, lumbering guitars at Birmingham’s Supersonic Festival. After witnessing Raster-Noton honchos Alva Noto and Byetone dealing the coup d’etat to an already demolished crowd on Sunday of the festival, some smooth and slinky club beats seemed like the best option. This edition features Cooly G’s finest material yet, spacey galactic funk from Space Dimension Controller and a bracing set of techno remix 12"s from The Black Dog and Perc. Perfect to scour the last peelings of riff from our tired ear canals.
To accompany this month’s column, this mix from Bristol’s ‘best kept secret’, DJ duo The Kelly Twins comes as highly recommended listening. Recorded for Bass Music Blog, it gathers together strands from the city’s current infatuation with house music with a bit of hip-hop, techno and other club stuff from around the globe. Stretching to over ninety minutes and featuring Hackman’s stunning ‘She’s Smoking Miaow’, it’s easily the best free mix of the last month.
Cooly G – Landscapes/It’s Serious [Hyperdub]
DVA – Madness feat. Victor Dupiaux/Polyphonic Dreams [Hyperdub]
Space Dimension Controller – Pathway to Tiraquon 6 [R&S]
His full-length follow-up for the label Pathway To Tiraquon 6 heads even further into the void. The travel connotations of its title are well-justified. Admittedly, my experience of it has been in a rather more prosaic setting: the 9:52 Highbury & Islington to Stratford, rather than an interstellar spacecraft with course plotted toward Tiraquon 6. But in its easy forward drive and bleed between tracks, it does have something of the mood of a journey about it. Its longer, more club-friendly tracks borrow more heavily from classic Detroit textures than before, particularly on the lush techno of ‘Usurper’ and the Warp-ish ‘Max Tiraquon’. They’re punctuated by long beatless interludes, the sound of the music occasionally falling into weightlessness, as if sucked out of an airlock. And it’s only during the stunning zero-gee disco of highlight ‘Flight Of The Escape Vessels’ when Hamill feels compelled to unleash one of the wriggling worm lead lines that pockmarked most of his earlier music. During its final minute one briefly appears, gracefully pirouetting in the distance before being lost to the interstellar murk. Hamill’s most complete sounding statement so far, and one of the few dance full-lengths I’ve heard this year that works like a proper album, Tiraquon 6 bodes well for next year’s upcoming sequel.
Perc – Wicker & Steel Remixes 1 & 2 [Perc Trax]
The Black Dog – Liber Chaos (Remixes) [Dust Science]
The second Perc remix 12” is softer and slightly more fluid than the first. Walls’ remix of ‘Choice’ is the only one to make use of the wonderfully downbeat Louise Wener monologue that opens Wicker & Steel. Where the rest of the remixers deal with percussion as hard and clean as pebbles, here the drums are allowed to blur into the rest of the track, to hazy effect. Broken20 label head TVO is an unusually versatile producer, a fact reflected in the inclusion of his two remixes of ‘You Saw Me’. His ‘Free Fife’ version is drawn-out, icy drone, percussion only allowed to flicker across its surface; the ‘Cherry Red’ version is slow, funky techno in the vein of the Horizontal Ground label. Both versions are excellent, making for the strongest out of the three 12"s here.
Mosca – Wavey EP [3024]
October & Borai – Sticky Fingers/Left Out [brstl]
Asusu – Sister/Too Much Time Has Passed [Livity]
Vessel – Wax Dance EP [A Future Without]
