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review by Bill Binkelman From Ultimae Records, an excellent electronic music label based in France, comes part 4 of their EM compilations known as Fahrenheit Project. This is the first of the "project" that I have heard and I'm sorry for that because this is an amazing compilation! All of the tracks are previously unreleased and the artists cut a wide swatch across the ambient/electronica/EM landscape. Track sequencing is spot on (compiling and mixing was done by Vincent Villius, a producer and dejay; the man knows his stuff!). In particular, the bridging between selections is seamless, no matter how distinct the songs end up being. Solar Fields starts things off with "Union Light," a track which moves from initial swirling ambience to high energy twinkling sequences and heavy bass beats, the former carrying more than a whiff of Berlin. The soft fade-out of this song leads straight into the funky snare beats, pulsing bass drums, and looped electric guitars of Puff Dragon's "Chinese Radio." This song really gets into your bloodstream (via your backbone). Those bass drum rhythms seem to head straight for your spine and the spacy guitar snakes every which way, as if it was circling in for the kill. The album then alters course dramatically with "Memory Shell (Mindgames Festival Live Version)" from Aes Dana. Pulsing with cyber-EM and glitch/skitch beats, this track has a frenetic but not overpowering feel to it, as well as an abundance of well-placed snippets of distorted/echoed vocals (spoken, not sung). It reminded me a little of Current's music, but only in a marginal way. There are seven more songs I could detail, but then this review would take almost as long to read as the album does to play (a whopping 68 minutes!). The remaining selections all offer some version of EM, electronica, chill-out, dub-like ambient, or hybrids of those subgenres. Aural Planet's "Hydropoetry Cathedra" is trippy and dubby in the same way that a lot of music from the Waveform label is, but here it's denser, more complex with more going on in the background and the rhythms are more insistent. My favorite cut is "Audio Deepest Night" from Cell. This one is amazing as it weds deep space washes (a la Meg Bowles) with sonar-like synth reverberations and then evolves into an ultra-tasty melange of quasi-glitch/pseudo-tribal rhythms laid under that cosmically sexy spacemusic. It's rare for me to say that an eight-plus minute track is too short, but I'm tempted to write just that in reference to this piece! Yet another superb number is the one after "Audio Deepest Night," Vibrasphere's "Northern Sunsets" which begins with kinetic twinkling synth bell-tones, and then inserts rhythms a little at a time, first adding a nice bass line, and then a chattering organ-like accompaniment and some solid licks from what sound like calypso/island drums! Audacious! The album ends on a relatively somber note with Hol Baumann's "Send Away," a somewhat melancholic downtempo piece that is nonetheless wonderfully evocative, with its muted synth textures, assortment of glitchy beats, and overiding sense of desolation and isolation. A forlorn female world vocal chant and additional Middle Eastern/East Indian beats emerge later in the song, but it never loses its darker and more downtempo shadings, instead merely dialing up the intensity and bit and spicing it up with a little cilantro and curry. Don't be timid about getting this album just because you may not recognize any of the artists I have mentioned in this review. If they aren't household names, it's only because of lack of exposure. These artists all deserve more recognition, because their talent merits it! Kudos to Ultimae and Vincent Villius for assembling such an outstanding compilation. For lovers of rhythmic EM in a virtual full spectrum of colors, this one gets a huge thumbs up from me. |
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