freak51

I found this impossible to get into, monotonous and boring. I wouldn't play it for more than a couple of minutes. Sorry folks, usually I adore this outfit. 3/10.

This is worth having. It's a tad on the space-dolphin tip, but well-crafted. 8.5/10

Noisy, bangy. Not as harsh as the DIMO clan, but there's not much love in it either. Not my cup of tea, but it is well-executed. 6/10.

This is another excellent cross-over chill-out album. Influences here range far and wide, he even incorporates some cheesy old-euro-trance stuff and manages to make it greasy-good, like musical fish & chips. It takes several spins to grok all the details on this record, but because of all the influences, there's almost guaranteed to be a track on here you can work into any point in a chill-out/post-everything kind of set. It works well as a whole album, too, if you're feeling lazy. I still prefer Marsmellow, but in a few months I may change my mind. 9/10.

Am I the only one who doesn't get it? Do I need to play it over speakers instead of headphones? Do I need to be stoned and/or doing something else? Because this to me sounds way too monotone and slow. I withhold judgement for now.

Deltot and Intelligate are good tracks. I don't understand how anyone could go for the Dark Soho track - I really hate the cute-triplet breakdown. The rest is pretty pointless to me. 3/10.

Nah - I still can't get into this, really. It seems like a lot of effort went into it, but it still sounds awfully twee to me.

It's a wee bit progressive, and the A side is iffy to me. The B side is well sorth owning. I'm looking forward to further releases from this outfit.

Listen a few times if necessary to Occidental Sadhu until it grabs you. This is, for my money, one of the best Saafi Brothers tracks ever - one of the best tracks ever, full stop. Ant Invasion is nice but definitely aging. Freak is an all-time classic. Noosleap is also worth having. Most of the rest is disposable. 6/10.

Boom Devil - Rumble Artist: Boom Devil Title: Rumble Label: Flying Rhino Date: 2001 Track listing: 01. 07'22" Life Is 02. 05'36" Over You 03. 06'16" Nothing To Be Afraid 04. 06'48" Rumble 05. 04'42" Ease The Pain 06. 06'28" Pyroclastic 07. 04'17" Lullaby 08. 06'53" Call Her Name 09. 07'13" Check 4 Zero 10. 02'22" Epilogue 11. 05'21" Been Thinkin Review: At last, a record for those of us who wish Portishead would cover Sneaker Pimps. Move over, Brain Food. Step aside, The Earth Moving the Sun. Flying Rhino has provided the new worst-ever Goa record. The first two tracks feature a lot of maudlin sweeping violins, a whole lot of sappy love song lyrics, sung all syrupy by a sassy lady who probably has a fabulous body - oh wait - it might be her on the 'Something for the Weekend' cover! I still do like 'Nothing to be afraid of' very much, but it's already been released. Rumble is a me-too breakbeat track, all overpolished with a percussion line that's included in the Casiotone demo programs. Track five, there she is again, on top of another track that has no new ideas from the first two. Track six, some faster snare-driven breakbeats, and another clip-art atmosphere, this time LTJ Bukem-style. Not bad, but you don't need to listen to the whole track; one minute will give you all you need to know. Track 7, that bloody songstress again on gloomy Bristol garagey samples they must have dug up from the 1997 top-of-the-pops time capsule. We get the point! Stop the inanity! Track 8, I can't stand it! This could get airplay on AM golden-oldies radio. It's already its own muzak Yanni-fied horror. Oooo, track 9 starts in a promising fashion, nice washboardy effects and ghostly choir, add some bullfrogs, pause, oh shit here come the cinematic violins. Enter a simple breakbeat around 120 BPM and some spy-movie-soundtracks effects, ehhh, not bad. Track 10 is DJ-helper fade-out ambience, could be useful somewhere. Just a semantic quibble here, an epilogue is supposed to be at the end. And don't I wish it had been! Track 11 is an awful spoken-word attempt with some Hallmark-card-worthy trite wishful thinking, Robbie Robertson already made this record, much better, way back in 1986. I suppose it could have been worse without the few adequate tracks, so 0.5/10.

I took the advice of the many above who singled out 'Beast Man' and listened to it, hard, on headphones. Wow! Gorgeous track.

Ooooo! Quel surprise! Much better, first thing in the morning.

Around the World in a Tea Daze borders on a ripoff of Disney cartoon backdrops, or else if I had the footage handy, I'd like to see how it plays with Animaniacs' "Around the World with Dot". #5 and #6 didn't grab me either. However, Dorset Perception and A New Way to Say Hooray are worth the price of this record alone, and then some. These tracks are gold. Star Shpongled Banner is OK, but I can't stress how much everyone needs this record for #1 and #3. Simon Posford does things with voice effects that just melt me into a vibrating puddle of bliss. The production values on this are stupendous, too. The clarity and detail would make an audiophile weep. Huge!

Parts of this record are really nice: 15 seconds, Pro-Tek, a couple of other tracks. But too much of this sounds like standard ZMA. I was hoping for more personality. This would probably mix nicely with Future Prophecy, but I made the mistake of mixing it in from the new Shpongle, and it was like, 'where did all the flavour go?' It is acceptable to wait several years between releases, but if an act does I prefer having the release worth the wait. It sounds to me like they didn't put a whole lot of effort in here. 6/10.

Actually I just listened to this on my new stereo (moved to Australia, took the opportunity to sell/give away my ten-year-old-Yamaha/Paradigm configuration to an embarrassment of riches with NAD/Numark/Mission, mmmmm). This is the sort of disc that makes you glad you quit worrying about it and just spent too much damn money on gear. There are details in here I had no idea about before. Patchwork, I hardly knew ye. I can't wait to get the new one! 9.5/10 on a nice system.

This is a departure. I don't know if I like it yet. It's got nice new-style percussion, but lots of old-school melodies - realised with new keyboard sounds. Some bits are waaay too cheesy, but being an old goa-head, I dunno, kind of takes me back to a more naive place. I didn't like Gangster at all, the samples are awful. Liquid Skies and Ananda are definitely throwbacks, but not bad for that. The Land of Freedom mix - well I think he should have left well enough alone on that. We don't need another Teleportation effort in this world. I think I'll keep this one and play it only when no-one's around, wave my hands in the air a little, give my head a shake, stab a mime through the heart with a glo-stik and put on Kopfuss Resonator again.

Kopfuss Resonator - Slotmachine Artist: Kopfuss Resonator Title: Slotmachine Label: Lecker Date: 2001 Track listing: 01. 04'36" Never More Disco 02. 07'13" Monocain 03. 05'42" Salsa 04. 05'07" Give Her the Fuck 05. 07'57" Fruitloop 06. 08'26" Ganga (Holy Water) 07. 06'25" The Raven 08. 06'52" Monokiller 09. 07'07" Electric Rodeo 10. 05'18" Elektro Mechanic 11. 07'24" Bali Review: Welly-welly-welly-welly-well! First off, let's note that this CD won't make any new fans of Kopfuss Resonator. If you found their last one harsh, you're going to hate this one too. It's no skin off KR's nose - they're not what anyone would call crowd-pleasers! Having said that, this is an evolution of their style - where they would have gone to excess before, they no longer belabour anything, really (well, sometimes - see below). This is _not_ a CD for newcomers to electronic music. I think that to get the most of this CD, the listener should know a lot of early stuff (maybe 1983 onwards or so). If your first exposure was Infected Mushroom, you're going to have a much different trip than I did. OK, to business: the cover art. The last one I found excellent, this one is no disappointment. A metropolitan skyline blurred into the standard graphical .WAV file representation. Beautiful and functional! Track one: let's take this for what it is, a joke/experiment/warning: psy-* acts, don't even think of trying to incorporate porn-house influences. They take a disco riff and throw all kinds of tricks at it, frantic heroic measures to save the dying patient. The highly skilled treatment is very attractive, but the basic disco riff still sounds like tiresome worn-out MTV fodder. The message here is that if even this didn't save it, nothing will. Daft Punk, are you listening? Your day is done and Kopfuss Resonator shows why. After this weird start, they get serious with Monocain & Salsa. Both are sonic killers in bleeding-edge style, but maintaining the integrity of the old German hard-trance spirit. Track 4, more of the same pummelling vibe with an 80s Mantronix-ish voice saying 'Maaaannn, give her the fuck' every once and a while. It works. Fruitloop is more full-on hard techno, a 4AM track if there ever was one. Ganga is 2-3 years old, but still not only sounds excellent but fits perfectly in this spot. The Raven is a really ballsy effort, a dark funereal horror-movie-demonised voice reading Poe's 'The Raven' over top of some nice minimal psy-techno 135 BPM. Wicked! Then we get 'Monokiller' in they whip out their members and hey, theirs _are_ bigger than anyone's! It starts with the Alexander Delarge sample from 'Clockwork Orange' (above), then immediately goes full-on German hard techno/industrial for nearly seven minutes. Gruelling and a tiresome after about 3 minutes. It's a serious DJ tool. The next track, I wasn't keen on, older-style German hard techno/industrial again. Elektro Mechanic delivers a breakbeat Kraftwerk-ish vibe, but bordering on industrial again (french voice: 'techno - le jungle - audio'. Great work. Bali is an ordinary chill-out track, kind of works, like someone who's tried to teach himself to smile with pictures of smiles and a mirror. This last track is iffy. Some tracks on this work are not so hot, but one day years from now if you find yourself without rent money, and you have a shitpile of old techno/trance CDs from way back you have to sell, this one won't be the last one you part with but it will be in the last batch. A very good 8.5/10, with lots of no-shit-emergency tracks.

I listened to this and tried to get into it - but failed. For me, 5.5/10. It's not bad, I just find myself bored. But then again it took me months to get into Atmos, so who knows?

'Silicon Trip' as a track still sounds amazing, years later. And even though the melodies are unsurprising, they are in no way cheesy - furhtermore, the harmonies in 'Temporal Shift' still howl for blood.

Certainly, at least tracks #1 and #7 are already released. However, this is still a very strong release for chillaxing. Multiverses has some cheesy voice samples that somehow work in context. 8/10.

Packed with old-school flavour-juice. If you can't get enough of the old Dimension 5-type tip, then you're going to need this. If you're over melodies and just want structures and sonic/percussive relations, this is not for you. Personally, I can't get into this anymore, too jaded. More power to those of you who can, for this is on par with old Jaia. An honest full-on original effort.

Not bad, but I prefer a rounder sound. This outfit has lots of talent; the next one should be a killer once they find their sound. 7.5/10

This is a nice trip-hoppish album. It gets a bit dull at times, but this is a skilled production worth having. In the background of doing something else, this one shines. 8/10.

I'll probably never get back into the Israeli sound again, but this record is way better than the first one. It's not shit.

Spiritjack - Sensisizer Artist: Spiritjack Title: Sensisizer Label: Plusquam Date: 2001 Track listing: 01. 06'01" Tropico 02. 05'48" Shivirelu 03. 04'49" Sensisizer 04. 06'36" Oldwave 05. 06'27" Dawn Exotica 06. 07'00" Chaka 07. 07'14" Slow Burning 08. 06'54" Quetzal 09. 05'55" Kin 35 10. 05'37" Shinoviiloha 11. 06'28" Maria Savina Review: The disc starts out with a slow psychedelic dubby track, but with influences from WARP-records-style sounds. Also, I think it's a tweaked Trinidadian steel drum sound that makes the melody. At first I think, 'hmm this is a bit annoying' but then, although nothing changes, suddenly it's just fine. The treatment is to die for. Then from there the vibe slowly morphs into a sort of slowed-down vibe that pulls from Detroit and Germany. If there's any criticism that anyone might make of this disc, it's that it is very similar-sounding throughout. However, it's a very hypnotic, supportive groove and the production is superb. The tempo is just slow enough to grok all the reverberation and echo. Once you've found this vein, why leave? Yet somehow towards the middle it plays with more danceable percussion at about 130 BPM, more minimal-Detroity, before settling back down to the futon - all without betraying the theme. Although I loved it from the first spin, I keep finding I love it more each time. I won't give it 10 because I still marginally prefer Dub Trees and Amaruvision to this. But still worth buying several copies, for yourself and for presents for special friends. 9.5/10.