Mala in Cuba - preview

Mala unveals the first full-length tracks from his forthcoming Mala in Cuba album, a collaboration with Gilles Peterson and various Cuban musicians set to drop on the 10^th September. Whilst Coki's particular brand of dubstep is starting to become rather overplayed, Mala's constantly been spreading his wings and experimenting. Peterson fairly boldly claims that "This is the record that reevaluates and realigns the dubstep movement within soundsystem culture", and whilst that's a hell of a grandiose statement to live up to, the two tracks so far sound fun, fresh and begging for a big-system run-out, though frankly, they sound very little like dubstep.




More details as we get them.

Sendai - Geotope

Sendai - Geotope (Time to Express, 26th March)

Peter Van Hoesen and Yves De May's Sendai project returns with a full length album of super-minimalist sound explorations that probe the relationships between technology and music, melody and form, mechanical aesthetics and pure machinery. Whilst Sendai is more than just the sum of it's parts, the seeming disparity between Peter Van Hoesen's brutalist techno style and Yve's De May's delicate audio-engineering provides an analytical framework for Geotope, which imposes a minimal aesthetic onto the techno template until it begans to collapse inwards under the weight.

Whilst the likes of Terminal Silver Box and Win Tepsit / Brief Delay could easily be mistaken for somnambulant doom or wallpaper-esque drone, with their cavernous groans and swathes of noise, there's the most spectral sense of rhythm that pervades everything - a repeated snap of static that might be a snare, or noticeably quantised swathes of noise. Equally, when Sendai indulge in obviously beat-driven tracks such as A Refusal To Celebrate A Statistic A Probability, or the AFX-inflected Further Vexations, the percussion continually buckles under brutal layers of distortion and grain delay, never allowing a solid groove to build up. Throughout the album noise defeats melody and abstraction is key, with Sendai dismantling the techno blueprint, taking it apart from the ground up, using decaying machinery and white noise to distort anything recognisable.

Towards the latter half of the record, Sendai ease up on the white noise headfuckery, and give the listener two sublimely screwy tracks that verge on techno genius in EP2010-4- and Geotope. The former sits somwhere between Sandwell and Sahko, with a truly monstrous wall of bass and shortened bleep melodies, whilst the latter's slow-loping beat and watery melodies are utterly devastating and demands to be played loud. Despite the almost aggressive resistance to techno's norms, Geotope provides a solid narrative and evolution that proves rewarding listening. Closing track Emptiness of Attention feels like one of Move D's weirder moments, with a bubbbling bassline filtering up and down, punctuated by synth flourishes and static, before breaking down into a drained ambient coda. It's at oninfuriating and somehow a perfect close to a dense and tricky album.

Voltergeist - Burnt & Buried - Bad Sekta (Out Now)

Burnt and Buried finally drops, the second full-length release from Voltergeist since his excellent CDR Earthen Spirit Loops, and if anything, the boy's got weirder - drafting in a heftier dose of acid-fried synths, a stronger influence from the dub (not dub techno), and an array of surreal samples, from Calypso, to Jamaican Hot Sauce adds, to the much-beloved Portland Bill.

"To me, making a tape is like writing a letter - there's a lot of erasing and rethinking and starting again. A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You've got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention (I started with "Got to Get You Off My Mind", but then realized that she might not get any further than track one, side one if I delivered what she wanted straightaway, so I buried it in the middle of side two), and then you've got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, and you can't have white music and black music together, unless the white music sounds like black music" - Rob, Hi Fidelity, Nick Hornby.

Hornby's utterly spot-on tale of musical obsession contains this absolute gem about how to craft a great mixtape, and it's certainly relevant to Burnt & Buried, which creeps into life with delicate chimes and floaty synths, before a warpy bassline and rolling dub percussion kick off Boogu Yagga. In accordance with Hornby's rules, Pork Chops ups the ante with breakbeats and sawtoothed synths, whilst taking out some of the punch by dropping a speech about Hot Sauce over the top. There's the appropriate mid-album lull in the shape of the ethereal Inna Self-made Net, whilst Sing It To The Moon gathers the pace before the final big hitter of John Canoe. Closing the album is the cathartic coda of Guillemot Rock, wich ends the album with a foreboding slur of "Science has failed us" trailing off into delay and reverb.

Voltergeist claims to have created a more personal piece of work than previously, throwing in both childhood fascinations Pirates and Caribbean music with a more adult appreciation of Jamaica's significance as a cultural and musical melting pot. Despite this, there's still a fair heft of influence from Scotland and Ayrshire, with closing track Guillemont rock using children's show Portland Bill as an allegory for the sparseness and isolation of the Scottish coastline, as well as drawing on the melancholy of Scottish folk music. Braindance-meets-folk innovator Frogpocket's appearance on the title track further cements the Scottish influence, adding haunting fiddles to a sub-90bpm dub steppa and creating a unique fusion of rootsy african structures and Scottish folk melodies. It almost shouldn't work, it ought to become cluttered and messy, but one of the most satisfying things about this album is the fusion of so many different styles, so many influences, all churning and struggling, creating an epically claustrophic piece of dark dub.

Download from Bad Sekta here.

Note: Shame on me, this review was meant to be published before the release, but due to work commitments, and the urge to give this a good going over, it's only just finished. Sorry Shaun.