{ uvg212. }

{ No Head In The Helmet reviewed by Hypnagogue... }

It takes some balls to open your disc with a robotic voice spewing out a warning that starts with, “Hello, my name is Susan. Welcome to hell.” and suggests that maybe you should take it back and get a refund. But at the very least, Suck Susan–another identity for Mr. Michael Valentine West–gives you a chance to hit “stop” before he starts bludgeoning you with a pile of scavenged sound and five-punches-a-second glitch. No Head in the Helmet takes some getting used to, and some may never get used to it. It’s divided into two sections. The first 12 tracks comprise “Reality Block.” This part ranges from the intense, grinding noise and pure assault of “Kelechi Said So” to the hip-hop flavored snap of “Superhero Micro-Skills” and “Blood Smear.” Big beats, vocal drop-ins and a load of bass keep this stretch moving. It’s not always easy. “Krush-Style Movements” feels too close to a piece that’s wandering to find its identity; “Wu Tang Temple of Bass Mantra” uses the words “Wu Tang” so much that I want to find RZA and slap him. The last eight tracks come under the title “12-Bit Dust.” The tracks here feel a bit slowed down, less glitch and more strategically placed noise-bits. It feels, often, like an intentional undermining of downtempo memes, reconfigured to play up the experimental. “Thirty-Six Double D in Repetition” pulls apart “My Funny Valentine” and sort of presses it back together with a lot of gaps purposefully showing, while a lounge beat gets kicked around by electronics. “Surrender to Water” revives the early-90s trend of pairing dance structures and opera. It’s about the calmest water, pardon the pun, on the whole disc. “Blessed by God” is a downplayed track as well, picking up a brass phrase and a backbeat laid down over a man talking about his life and why he is blessed. An old-school approach, shades of IDM’s beloved samples, that works. The final track, “End Trip,” however, is bound to piss people off. It’s five and half minutes of tiny scratches, pops and clicks, and nothing more. Sounds a lot like when a vinyl LP reached the end but the tone arm wouldn’t go up. Tucked in there, however, are beat phrases that suddenly make themselves clear before ducking back into the super-minimal wash. I quite like Michael Valentine West’s work, but I have to admit that No Head in the Helmet made it hard to find a point of entry. That initial warning and the aggressiveness of “Kelechi Said So” are like a wall of acid you’ve got to pass through. It’s like an aural screening process. Once I could look past the noise and get ahold of the more interesting constructs–the hip-hop cred, the intricacies of the glitch-work–it got a little easier. But it’s tough work for the listener from start to finish.

( N a m e ) @ Tuesday, 9 October 2012 / 15:09 / 0 comments

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{ Suck Susan Igloo Mag Review }

Sliced into fragments of minutes, Suck Susan manages to somehow elaborate on form and function, offering a maze of definitive, decomposed fractures that yield a smattering of processed vocals, samples, found sounds, bass and heavy beat workings. Suck Susan is an interesting project, to say the least. Had imprints like Skam, Merck and even Ninja Tune combined forces, you may get No Head In The Helmet as the result. So as you can imagine, UVG212 and Daddy Tank have unleashed a behemoth of a CDr release in the form of two parts—Reality Block for the first 12 cuts and 12-Bit Dust for the remaining eight. What the ears are presented with is a collage of molten blips, crackles and dusty electronics that lean more on hip-hop foundations rather than IDM terrain. Sliced into fragments of minutes, Suck Susan manages to somehow elaborate on form and function, offering a maze of definitive, decomposed fractures that yield a smattering of processed vocals, samples, found sounds, bass and heavy beat workings. Broken into several bits and bytes, No Head In The Helmet derails preconceived notions of experimentation and instead offers subdued energy bursts draped in a blanket of fuzzy tones, collapsed grooves and broken rhythms. Taken in as a whole, it would have been interesting to hear a small dosage of tracks stretched out a little more, but it seems that the artist simply has hundreds of sonic ideas and this release is a primed collection of these disjointed slivers.

( N a m e ) @ Monday, 3 September 2012 / 04:27 / 0 comments

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{ Lower Third's Hiromi Restraint selected as album of the moment... }

Another good review for "Hiromi Restraint"... this time from Hawkwind Duvall.A cactus at online audio antihero. Yes. A cactus... [ALBUM OF THE MOMENT: Lower Third - "Hiromi Restraint" So me and my wickedcool buddies Tommy "Plastic" Dreamer and Stevie "Flex-Motion" Richards think this is mad dope. It's a 36 minute concept album about arriving on an abandoned space station that is host only to a malfunctioning but affectionate Robo-Geisha. Jamie said it was "avant-garde bullshit" but he's the fucking bullshit, mate. We Cacti and ECW alumni are not nearly so closed minded...in the desert/Philadelphia bingo-halls we know that true art is never easy and should challenge the listener. It's electronic, it's ambient, it's grating, it's discordant...This album sounds like Neil Young's "Trans" without the bits you liked. That's how good it is. Superb.]

( N a m e ) @ Friday, 20 July 2012 / 08:04 / 0 comments

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{ ...a review (of sorts...) of Hiromi restraint fron Capt Fidanza at collective-zine.co.uk }

This is an electronic album which for once, I will not be forced to consider using the word “atmospheric” when thinking about how best to describe it. That's not to say this album doesn't create an atmosphere of its own when you hear it, only that its highest ambition is clearly not to soundtrack an as yet unmade horror film in which young people are first stalked, then captured and bound, before being ruthlessly tormented and finally barbarically gutted.

There are lots of plinks and plonks here and several plunks too, in many places it sounds like the music which I imagine is playing inside The Cat in the Hat's head as he is introducing those two children to Things A and B.

In other news, I bought the Arab Strap album “Elephant Shoe” from amazon last week and had it delivered to my door for a combined total of less than £2. It is genuinely one of the best albums I have heard in the last few years so get yourselves over there and get one; if you hate it, I'll give you the £2.

Sadly I must go, my family gradunza has been stolen and I must report it to the police.

( N a m e ) @ Monday, 26 March 2012 / 16:41 / 0 comments

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{ Lower Third "Hiromi Restraint" review... }

Thank you Hypnagogue...

Oh, Michael Valentine West, how you love to challenge me. How you love to say, “Here, Mr. Hypnagogue, try describing this one.” So this time you show up as Lower Third, bearing the questionable gift of Hiromi Restraint, and once again, as you did when you wore your Twiggy & the K-Mesons outfit, leave me all wrapped up in your anything-but-normal ideas of electronic music. Why am I fascinated by the vocoder in “Quite Possibly You” and the way you match it up with that sparse, sort of menacing backdrop, the one that plops like lead raindrops? Why do I smile and bob my head at the simplistic chipset construct of “Hello Spaceman” even after you start tangling it up with a mess of other sounds? Why do I sit through “Atomic Drag Coefficient,” listening to the indecipherable computer voice and the sci-fi theremin warble, waiting for you to break it out–and not minding it a bit when you don’t because there was something in the way you built tension in the thing and a depth that made it interesting. You lead me on with “The Boy in the Paper Clothes,” that piano sounding like that old Primitive Radio Gods track, that metronomic beat, and everything pulled just a little back into the distance to make it interesting. You hammer away at me with the pure sonic assault you call “A Hole in Fabric of Time,” just flinging out every sound you’ve got en masse, anchoring it all with a simple bass riff and coyly playing an uncomplicated melodic line over it. Sometimes I understand why you make me crazy, though. “Automatic Death by Radio Jazz”? Really? Just drill into my skull next time. And that last thing? Can’t listen to it. Instant headache.

Oh, Michael. You’re so frigging weird.

You’re coming back soon, right?

( N a m e ) @ Thursday, 22 March 2012 / 11:29 / 0 comments

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{ Lower Third album review from sloucher.org... Thanks Keefy! }

The Lower Third – Hiromi Restraint

O.K. I am back on Planet Earth after a visit to Planet Tatooine.

I stayed in the pirate city of Mos Eisley and during my stay I hung out in the Cantina there. The food was unusual, the clientele abrasive and the music adventurous. Some geezer gave me a recording of the house band to review!

Well first time around the whole affair washed over me but second time around something crawled into my brain and I think (only think) I got it. Opening with a spaced out carnival waltz a proggy “70′s style organ leads into a spikey beat instrumental ‘Wall of Perspex’. Nice groove.

Some fucked up vocals and rather odd but inventive electronic musings follow and by the time track 6, ‘Hello Spaceman’, kicks in, I am sort of convinced that this is a future music record from another dimension. More spaced out vocals and weird radio tunings from outer space fall into a slightly C&W ballad of sorts. This is one hell of a trip – more knob twiddling and strangeness and we are into ‘The Boy in the Paper Clothes’ which is brooding and atmospheric, ‘Goodnight Sweet Feedback’ is quiet and introspective before ‘A Hole in the Fabric of Time’ drives through a wormhole with a dirty beat and rolling synths.

Silence and then ‘Track 13′ tidies the whole alien invasion up with some mashed up vocals mixed into a space/lounge tune that some drunken andriod must have remixed.

Hiromi Restraint is….. erm unusual and this is not the whole story. I did not dig this at all at first but I am converted ! After all it is 2042. Is’nt it?

PS. Who on Earth (or not) are these people?

Words: Keefy

( N a m e ) @ Wednesday, 25 January 2012 / 07:47 / 0 comments

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{ K-Mesons' "Technique" makes Album Of The Year list... }

Thank you Mark Whitby!

Friday, 16 December 2011
Top albums of 2011: 7. Twiggy & The K-Mesons - Technique (UVG/Daddy Tank)
Very few record labels manage three tracks in my end of year thingy, but then there are very few labels like the amazing Daddy Tank. Excellent though the label’s other releases have been, when I first heard Technique I was so thrilled my teeth flew out – and I don’t even have false teeth.

Robotic vocals combine with electronica by turns frantic and sublime to conjure up some kind of musical land that sci-fi forgot, where only barely recognisable musical forms lurk and where banality doesn’t exist.

Michael Valentine West is the man behind this brilliance, and you can hear a track from another project of his, Lower Third, in my December show on Dandelion Radio.

Posted by Mark Whitby at 02:12

( N a m e ) @ Sunday, 1 January 2012 / 17:44 / 0 comments

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