Links:
Meshuggah

But to increase the value and justify further that one purchase this interesting selection of early tracks, demos for Contradictions Collapse, rarities seeing the light of day for the first time, and a video for "New Millenium Cyanide Christ" are tossed into the mix. The video is worth the price of the disc alone. I love to see great bands play and the fact that they picked a bulldozer of a song as well just satisfies the demon within. I get so tired of the nu-metal crap on MTV and the radio that the chance to see a quality video is priceless. The plethora of rarities on the appropriately-but-unimaginatively-titled Rare Trax include: "The Ayahuasaca Experience" recorded under some strange "influence;" "By Emptyness Abducted" and "Don't Speak" from a brief studio stop circa True Human Design; a remix of "Concatenation," and the killer track "War" recorded for guitarist Fredrik Thordendal's 30th birthday. But wait, they also toss in a bonus video of "Elastic."

With more gimmicks and oldies, demos and rarities than a bootlegger has in a wet dream, Meshuggah has outdone themselves with this great compilation, but the video of "New Millennium Cyanide Christ" rules the roost. If you are a fan of Meshuggah, you will need to run out and grab this gem.

-Sabrina Haines
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Links:
Neotropic

It's an organic journey, filled with looped echoes, field recordings, classical interludes, straight-forward pop elements, country music twang, spooky atmospherics, and spoken word passages. It's a scattershot soundtrack to a road movie, which, ostensibly, it is. Included with the audio CD of La Prochaine Fois is a CD-ROM containing a film which is meant to be the visual element of the music. Heard in concert with the visuals, the music has a more cohesive feel. It is not just isolated moods and scattered leitmotifs, but rather connective tissue to the organic visual creature. As such, it works as a soundtrack, but as simply a collection of tracks; the elements are too diverse, too disparate in their stylings to be easily enjoyed in a single sitting. There are good tracks--country guitar whispering through "Sunflower Girl" and "Still," the loops and echoes of captive melodies struggling to break free of their banked memory locations in "Slink," and the off-kilter flute work of "Closer to the Sun"--but their fragmented placement within the larger framework seems patchwork, as if we are only hearing half of what is really there--which, in a way, we are. La Prochaine Fois shows that Maslen is continuing to grow and experiment with the interplay between music and the visual arts.

-Mark Teppo
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Links:
Peter Benisch

Well, it has taken a few years and Peter has only gotten better at melding titles to his work. Canada's Turbo Records should be exceedingly proud to bring to North American Peter's latest opus, Soundtrack Saga, which--not surprisingly--is both: a soaring soundtrack to an exploration to the top of the world, infused with echoes and melodies that will quickly live up to the "saga" appellation.

Now I'm not getting all gooey because I've been waiting and talking about the arrival of this album for three years and just don't want to look like an idiot because it doesn't live up to the hype and anticipation that I've placed on it. No, I want to go all soft for this disc because it surpasses my expectations. How often do you get what you ask for and then more?

"Skymning" begins with a Casio drum beat, a quaint, nostalgic, analog beat that immediately sets the tone: this isn't going to be an hour of DSP-wankery or IDM-fractured melodies. Benisch is out to produce a classic ambient-but not too ambient-house-but not too house-record. Having been classically trained since the age of nine, Peter's work is suffused with rich melodies, lush environments that speak of green spaces. The cover image of a couple walking across an ice field has been so bleached by the sunlight that the only thing which settles in your retinas is the pale green still left in the sky. Benisch definitely takes us into Biosphere's arctic territory with his beats and sonics, but this is the arctic tundra in the spring. The permafrost is melting and there is water beneath the crusted surfaces-unfrozen, moving water. "The Wireframe Fields" are permeated by this sense of motion beneath the surface, the beats continually pulsing beneath the soaring melodies and string flourishes. The cinematic sweep of "Temple of Opposites" is a definite candidate for incidental music in the next James Bond film. Even the "Love Theme" is delicately handled with its inclusion of drifting vocals by Emma Holmgren.

Soundtrack Saga is at the top of my list for 2001 and in hearty consideration for inclusion in the group of discs that I want to be buried with. More than just an ambient album, Soundtrack Saga is filled with overwhelming cinematic sweeps and melodies. There's a new genre here--"lushbient"--and this record is the standard which others will have to equal.

-Mark Teppo
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Peter Green's Macbeth: An Original Score certainly starts out in that territory with a frightfully playful overture called "Shipmeadow." An actual place about twelve miles from where Green lives, he says that the wee town was a source of inspiration and that "if you concentrate you should be able to 'hear' the rich meadows and pastures and the grass gently blowing in the summer breeze..." Just in time for the May Dance as the townsfolk get out their fiddles and pipes and drums and whip up a medieval dance number.

Just what in the hell have I stumbled upon? Just like the Danish lord stumbling into the clearing with the bubbling witches cauldron, I've wandered into a strange and sinister realm. Commissioned by the United Spirits Theatre Company, Green was asked to write the complete score and ambient interludes for the company's production of Macbeth. And, much like the work that Darren Verhagen does for dance troupes down in Australia, this work blows past the boundaries of traditional theater music. Green's score for Macbeth begins innocently enough with the "Shipmeadow" overture and "Medieval Dance," but, as soon as the specters begin to haunt the stage with "The Sinister Plot," the accompaniment begins to stray from classical and ambient to electro-acoustic and experimental. "Witches," composed while on the production of Macbeth, is a spooky, drifting landscape meant to accompany the stage action of mysterious figures mutating from solid stone. With "GT=tape" and "Grrearra Falcon," Green leaves all convention behind and scampers into the electro-acoustic realms, scraping tones and elongating sounds into haunted structures that sound like nothing more than the breakdown of synaptic connections and the death of neural paths.

-Mark Teppo
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Links:
Rhea's Obsession

Awash with Jim's guitar work (in a very My Bloody Valentine kind of way, especially in the instrumental "Strategies of Moonlight"), the Initiation tracks have a very Celtic and Irish feel to them, replete with hand percussion and Sue's evocative voice. The length "Hymn to Pan" feels like you've stumbled upon an ancient moonlight ritual with capering shadows and the performance of mysterious druidic rites. The whole thing feels like a ritual, actually, much more an involved course of events with distinctive parts--movements of a whole. The record isn't as polished as Between Earth and Sky and that is a lot of the appeal: this rite isn't polished; it is primal and otherworldly and filled with its own magic. Re:initiation invites us to participate in the formative ceremony that birthed Rhea's Obsession, invites us to cast off the trappings of modern society and freely dance under the moonlit sky.

-Mark Teppo
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Various Artists
Universal Indicator: Innovation in the Dynamics of Acid
Rephlex

Much more retrospective is the Universal Indicator: Innovation in the Dynamics of Acid release. A megamix put together by resident DJ Kommando, Mike Dred, Universal Indicator is 95 percent of the original 12-inch color-coded Universal Indicator acid records. Put together in late-night IDM-debauchery sessions, these tracks have been long unavailable in any format other than well-worn vinyl record and are a snapshot of booty-shaking acid house from the last decade. Unrelentingly danceable, these twenty-seven tracks are the results of the collaborative efforts of whomever was around when the gear was hot. Surprisingly uniform in quality, Universal Indicator is a collection of tracks that are simply joyful executions of creative energy.

Rephlex doesn't do maudlin and both of these compilations ably demonstrate that electronic music is still a very energetic genre of music. It's all about music that is both a joy to hear and a joy to make. Rephlex has been advocating this kind of pay-off for ten years and shows no sign of changing its tune.

-Mark Teppo
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Spectrum Pursuit Vehicle starts with an ignition countdown and instead of bursting into flames and sending a rocket into space, "White (you are in heaven)" fills your room with cascading harp strings and chirping bird song. Ambient in Eno's sense (interesting, yet completely suitable to being ignored), the tracks move effortlessly through each other, the harp and song shifting their melody and counterpoint to make room for the sound of distant surf in "Yellow (you are on a beach)." "Red (you are in the womb)" is filled with the rumble of a distant heartbeat and outer space drones, whooshes of gas expanding and pulsating past your head, sounds which become submerged in "Blue (you are underwater)." Clarke and Ware take you into the cool depths of "Green (you are in a forest)" before returning you to the blissful emptiness of "White (you are in heaven again)." Recorded using spatialization and visualization software to achieve an optimum 3D surround effect, Spectrum Pursuit Vehicle is a compelling record that works best in a breathing, organic environment: a room (or headspace) that takes on the colors of the sounds bled through it.

-Mark Teppo
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Links:
Wellwater Conspiracy

An experimentalist spirit coupled with a colorful hodge-podge approach to crafting rock songs (not to mention a revolving cast of contributing players) puts The Scroll and Its Combinations in the same league as last summer's kaleidoscopic freak-out Rated R by Queens of the Stone Age. Both bands have keenly blended a catalog of favorite influences--QOTSA's being more of the classic punk and blues-metal variety--into albums with original end results that stand strongly on their own. Wellwater Conspiracy, like QOTSA, roll over sounds from their younger days, slice them up with their own unique edge and reach audiences a generation detached from the '60s and '70s, using the power of good songwriting to meld it all together.

Wellwater Conspiracy is the brainchild of Matt Cameron and John Paul McBain, two musicians who've spent time traversing the higher reaches of the rock world. McBain helped raise Monster Magnet to life and Cameron, as nomad drummer, has spent time backing two of Seattle's biggest rock exports for the better part of the last decade. Their latest collaborative effort seems an outpouring of pent-up creative energy that, for Cameron anyway, cannot be properly released while battling the tide of mainstream success. Experimenting not only with song structure, rhythm and a primordial stew of influences, but also with instruments other than their respective bread-and-butter, Cameron and McBain pursue the oft forgotten ideal of pure musical freedom. Cameron actually sings lead on the majority of the tracks and makes a strong case for the rare singing drummer.

There are various guest appearances, most notably by Kim Thayil and Eddie Vedder (disguised on paper only, by the moniker Wes C. Addle). But, Wellwater founding member Ben Shepherd's playing appears only briefly, as a recorded afterthought on the trippy, jungle jaunting instrumental "Keppy's Lament." After putting out this impressively diverse album, that is both well-played and craftily-written, Wellwater Conspiracy should no longer be considered a side project but rather a talented and highly creative band that unfortunately gets together much too infrequently.

-Dan Cullity
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