Review: Marconi Union - Beautifully Falling Apart

I discovered Marconi Union quite recently when I read an article claiming they'd created the world's most relaxing song. This turned out to be horseshit, but the song was still pretty good, so I enqueued Beautifully Falling Apart for further listening. And guess what? It's pretty damn relaxing, like a lot of the post-rocky droney ambienty stuff it resembles. The music is a mixture of hazy texturalism and carefully placed delicate melodies. The tracks are deliberately soporific, as you'd expect from a band who deliberately set out to make the most relaxing track ever, but they're also quite interesting, with minimalist string arrangements and occasional guitar strums adding real-world instrumentation to the soundscapes.

It's very difficult to find much to say about this album. If I were still a real music journalist, this is the kind of shit that drive me into some over-reaching conceptual angle or polysyllabic word assault. It's really fucking chilled out and nice to listen to, okay? I like it a whole lot, but can it really be considered a classic? I don't know. Maybe I'll go back to this album dozens of times, or maybe I'll never play it again. The trouble with this droney stuff is it's really hard to find bad things to say about it, but really difficult to get excited about individual releases. This might be something I'll put on as background music when I want to fall asleep on some hung-over afternoon, but it doesn't get my pulse racing. AND THAT'S THE DAMNED POINT.

Overall this yet another extremely pleasant but not particularly great ambient/shoe-gazey/drone thing, and quite frankly I've heard enough. The next one I listen to is probably going to get a critical kicking for being the straw that broke the camel's back.

(I should add that I wrote this review a few weeks ago, but due to a laptop crash it stayed as a draft on my blogger account and is only now being uploaded.)

Genre: Ambient
Stupid Arbitrary Rating: 7/10

Review: Blue Motion - Stay Forever

Before I listened to it properly, I thought Blue Motion's debut LP Stay Forever was a drum 'n bass album. A minimal drum 'n bass album, certainly, but still a drum 'n bass album. It came out on Influenza Media, who are one of my subscribed labels on Beatport, and who pump out soulful melodic minimal drum 'n bass. Stay Forever certainly starts with a drum 'n bass track, the brilliant Walking Through The City, which opens on field recordings of a bustling city street and slowly unfurls an increasingly complicated drum 'n bass rhythm over super-moody ambience. However, that's about as up-tempo as the album gets (not very) and from there it actually gets progressively moreambient, until we're in ASC territory. The beatwork may be derived from drum 'n bass, but this is not an album about the beats, for the most part. I guess you could call it post-dnb, because minimal barely seems to cover how tenuous the connection is. There are a couple of soulful, slightly syrrupy moments such as One Step Away From Your Love, but for the most part this is extremely dark and moody.

Once I'd recovered from the unexpected direction of the record, I began to enjoy it massively. I know the term "deep" is about as wanky as it gets when describing music, but honestly this album is extremely deep. As in, it makes you feel deep. I don't mean it makes you feel intellectual and sophisticated, I mean you feel immersed. Lost. Floating. Around the eighth track, I did start to get just a tiny bit bored, but then the beautiful closing track The Path Unwalked got me back onside again. This, put simply, is a rainy day album. Music for watching raindrops splatter the window pane that separates you from the grey world outside, where everything looks cold but you still feel warm. It's melancholic and chilled and meditative. It's pretty fucking awesome, is what I'm trying to say.

A lot of guys are jumping on the minimal bandwagon right now, but Blue Motion manage to avoid making wallpaper lounge music. This is an album that would stand up to the most ardent ambient fan. I definitely feel this is going to need a few repeat listens to really decide just how good it is, but at the moment it's certainly hovering towards a 9/10. I guess I would have liked one or two up-tempo tracks near the end to vary things up a little, because although there are modulations in mood it does start to sound a little samey for a spell. For now, we'll mark it down as an 8/10, but I've been listening to music for long enough to know when an album's gonna be a grower, and this one has the potential to really become a favourite.

Genre: Ambien /drum 'n bass
Stupid Arbitrary Rating: 8/10, possibly maybe

Review: Onra - Chinoiseries Part 2

French beatmaker Onra finally follows up his excellent Chinoiseries album from 2007, and it's every bit as good as the original, possibly better. Chinoiseries is a project in which Onra strip-mines retro Vietnam vinyls for samples and then builds a dense instrumental hip-hop album from the results. He's obviously not the first person to do this - Madlib has done lots of geographically themed albums in recent times with his Medicine Show series - but I think Onra is a better beatmaker than Madlib. At least, I enjoyed these albums way more than anything I've heard from Madlib.

Onra basically follows the Stones Throw formula as defined by guys like Madlib and J Dilla (particularly his legendary Donuts album from 2006) - 30-40 ultra-short tracks per album, creating an ever-changing sampledelic beatscape where brilliant hooks, funky grooves and amusing vocal samples appear and enrapture for about thirty seconds before vanishing forever. It's a different approach to DJ Shadow-esque instrumental hip-hop, and occasionally you wish some of the more delicious cuts went on for 4-5 minutes instead of tantilising you for mere moments, especially as Onra is immune to making bad beats. He's found so many great samples here you could stretch the Chinoiseries material out to four or five conventional albums, easily.

With these albums, it's all about the strength of the samples, and consequently the richness of the sample source. A lot of the weaker albums of this type disguise the lack of solid hooks with endless quirky vocals, skits and rapid cuts between ideas, hoping you won't notice that nothing is holding your attention for very long because there's nothing to grab it in the first place. Not only has Onra struck gold in terms of finding plenty of great samples, he's also the first Westerner I've ever heard to make a retro-Vientamese themed album. The source is so unusual and underexplored that these albums can't help but sound fresh to anyone who doesn't have a collection of 1970s Vietnamese jazz LPs

Okay, yeah, this is basically a beat-tape with no real structure, held together as a listening experience by embracing its inherent fragmentation. And yeah, if you've already heard the original album you might find this to be "more of the same". But this is high calibre head-bobbing material, so densely constructed it stands up to more intensive listening, and it's got more musical content that many artists fit into their entire discography. Worth a listen if you're into instrumental hip-hop, and if you're new to the genre - oh man. You've got a treat in store.

Genre: Instrumental hip-hop
Stupid Arbitrary Rating: 8/10

Review: Antares - Exodus

More psy-trance here, this time from 18-year old baby-child Antares from Suntrip Records, and his debut album Exodus. Well, technically I suppose this is goa-trance - less in the way of those super-engineered basslines and more acid drenched old-school melodic goodness. I'm pretty sure that's the difference between psy and goa, although after ten years of listening to trance I'm still buggered if I can say for sure. Either way, those of you whose Albums Of The Year lists consist entirely of 125bpm techno records are going to run away crying from this album.

Honestly, I really enjoyed this album, but my God is it exhausting. There's a run of tracks in the middle, particularly 11-minute Aurum Solis, that just feel like never-ending outer space hallucinations. I've been to psy-trance parties without being on drugs before and it's a serious test of endurance (no wonder they have those chill-out rooms full of ambient dub and dope smoke), and even without having to dance to these tracks I'm getting a similar sensation. It's total sensory overload.

It's worth sitting through this middle stretch, though, because both the beginning and end are awesome. The opener, The Exodus, is a real beauty, a piece of low-tempo cyber-dub full of lush sitars and summery vibes, while second track Mysticism unfurls into a piece of liquid trance. Once you come out the other side of the Beyond The Infinite section, there's the delights of Mount Meru and the appropriately star-streaked Astral Plane to savour, and then another low-tempo groover to close on in Sun Sanctuary. Well, I say low tempo, this one is still at 125bpm, which is Peak Time Madness to the Resident Advisor massive. The album essentially has a pyramid structure, rising in energy and intensity to a mid-album peak and then bringing you back down again. The apex of this structure is a little too much for me, but the bits on either side are pretty damn excellent. And best of all, this is an unabashed, undiluted goa trance album that manages to be almost completely devoid of the unbearably cheesy references to LSD, bongs, extra-sensory perception, consciousness expansion or ancient alien colonists that blight so much psy/goa. I scarcely thought such a thing was possible.

I don't think this one is quite as good as Artifact303's album Back To Space, which also came out on Suntrip Records, has a better name and better artwork and is probably the best trancey album I heard all year. But I do need to relisten to Artifact303 and in the meantime this is a bang tidy album. It's not particularly original - in fact it could probably have come out in 1996 and everyone would have been too addled on acid to have noticed the anachronistically good production quality - but this sound is pretty rare these days, which means this counts as a Revival rather than a Rehash. In other words - it doesn't really matter if something's been done before if it was done so long ago it sounds fresh to hear it again.

Genre: Goa trance
Stupid Arbitrary Rating: 8/10

Review: Magnus - Signal Strength

Magnus - Signal Strength is probably the best album to come out of J00F Recordings this year, marginally shading the Digital Blonde's album and considerably shading, and then drawing comedy moustaches all over J00F's own album, which to be honest wasn't up to much. J00F, for those who don't know, is John 00 Fleming, British trance DJ and probably the most reliable big name trance DJ by a long shot. After a long career spent dabbling uncertainly in psy-trance and progressive, he seems to have settled neatly into that hybrid of the two: progressive psy-trance, or prog psy and his sets seem to get better and better as years go by. J00F and his label basically stand for dark and driving trance music, usually beginning in deep and atmospheric prog territory and moving into face-melting full-on psy trance. In a club it's absolutely awesome to behold - J00F is one of the few DJs I travel around the country to see. In an album format, however, it's not quite that inspiring.

J00F: The Record Label is both blessed and cursed by a signature sound. On the plus side, it's got its own corner in the market - a totally distinctive style that is cultivated by a dedicated stable of artists who are generally guaranteed to deliver quality. On the downside, this means that the entire J00F catalogue basically sounds the same. Fine if you're a DJ and you're going to play a few of these tracks in your set, but sitting at home with the headphones on for 80 minutes listening to an album, it's not so fun. Especially when your living room doesn't contain a monstrous soundsystem and hundreds of ravers going nuts to the music. Again, this isn't necessarily a problem, because J00F is a dance label that caters to DJs, and they do a damn fine job at that, but I don't really see the point in a label releasing artist albums like this one. There is virtually no concession here to making this suitable for home-listening. These are all club tracks, and good ones, but 12 full club cuts with the DJ-friendly intro/outros is just a bit dull to play at home. It's not like the days when you'd buy an album of full cuts for the value-for-money: now we can just download and DJ our favourites anyway, and there's no need to pay for the filler material. As I complained about with the Scenic & Advisory album, it feels totally insignificant which order the tracks come in - you can randomise the tracklist and the listening experience will be almost identical. 12 good tracks an interesting album does not make.


Another issue is that Magnus commits a sin I think quite a few prog-psy producers are guilty of - quite a few of these tracks go on for too long and only become interesting for the last few minutes. It's like these guys think a club track must be 7-8 minutes long, regardless of whether they have the musical content to fit into that time, and I don't get why so many of these tracks have such ultra-long build-ups. I've got no problem whatsoever with ultra-long dance records: I love a good Sasha track that goes on for longer than a Greek epic, but only if there's a point to them being that long. There are a few class cuts on this album - Hypnotic, Signal Strength and Raven Rock stand out in particular - but honestly I just stopped listening to this album towards the end and put something else on, because I was getting bored. In that respect, this is the classic pointless dance LP - good tracks, no reason whatsoever to ever listen to it all at once.

Genre: Progressive psy-trance.
Stupid Arbitrary Rating: 6/10