New Releases: November 2022
Liaisons' / Velodrome's Krishna Goineau, Homies Join Forces, A² Fanboying, More TerraFirm Propaganda and a Shortlist of November's Many Other Hitters.
November was a big one. My monthly Redeye (plz sponsor me Tom) box contained 14 records of new music, reissues, represses and unreleased vault tunes. I think the month’s fecundity is largely due to label owners trying to thread the needle, squeezing their last release of the year in the sweetspot between August’s no-fly-zone and the holidays. Mix in pressing plant delays and many of those planned for September / October didn’t actually hit shelves till November. Good news for those that can delay gratification but I’m still wondering where the Chris Korda LP I preordered in July is. Anyways, it was a bumper crop. I’ve written about four 12”s and provided a list of the best-of-the-rest below.
Krishna Gouineau feat. MCL - 80’s Tapes [Italo Moderni]
Krishna Goineau is one of those increasingly-rare birds who’ve dedicated their life to art through a polyglot, bohemian wanderlust born out of 60’s counterculture. A quick bio from K’s beautifully outdated website: Literally a creation of the above-mentioned culture, Krishna was born in 1963 in Sri Lanka to European beatnik parents who christened him after the central deity of the Baghavad Ghita and one of Hinduism’s manifestations of God. (Off to a great start). He spent his youth traveling Europe, working on various post-punk projects like Xeerox and, most famously, Liaisons Dangereuses, who held a casting call for a vocalist for ‘Los Ninos del Parque’ and chose the 16 year old Krishna. (Killing it). Liaisons’ importance to post-punk and all the genres that came in its wake – EBM, Industrial, Techno, etc – can’t be overstated. 40+ years after their self-titled LP, Liaisons cuts remain perennial fodder for DJs smoothly blending them with current techno or slamming them in with Chicago jak, Italo and other genres of yore.
The Liaisons years were brief. Krishna dipped out in the mid-80s to study shadow boxing in Taiwan. (Excellent resumé builder). He bounced back to Europe and became the vocalist and keyboardist for Metropakt and Velodrome, the latter also reaching cult status with На Велодроме 141, an EP that would be reissued by Dark Entries and whose vicious, mutant ‘Capataz’ would be edited multiple times, making its way into the Detroit canon and Ricardo Villalobos’ Radio 1 Essential Mix.
The mid-80’s were especially fertile years for Krishna and ones from which the EP in question would arise. Recorded with MCL (Micro Cheap League) over the course of a month in 1985, the three resulting tracks are peak Krishna. His freak, percussive vocals (this time in Spanish) ride on top of EBM synths and rhythms that presage the New Beat explosion that would shortly pop off in Belgium. Gone are the ultra raw, stripped post-punk aesthetic of Liaisons and Veldrome. While the previous are certainly dance music, 80’s Tapes puts forth a much more purpose-built vision with drum machine driven beats and synth-lines that would have fueled dancefloors of that era where Italo, proto-House, Industrial and EBM collided.
All three tracks are excellent and stand up to Krishna’s towering achievements with Liaisons and Velodrome. ‘La Forgeron’ and ‘La Dance’ are my picks for their driving, vocal-saturated energy and the trancey, Italo-indebted synth leads that can’t be found elsewhere in Krishna’s work. All are short, to the point and possibly in need of an edit. The B-side has some first takes at edits / remixes by Silent Servant, Curses, Esprit Divers and Deckard & Lucient. All except Silent Servant’s are closer to remixes and too heavy-handed in their reconfiguring of the originals for my taste.
Krishna’s journey through art and life continued beyond the 80’s. In the early 2000’s he lived on the La Désirade island of Guadeloupe in the French West Indies, a paradise I had the supreme good fortune of visiting in 2016. Staying in a mango grove on the slope of the main island’s volcano, La Grande Soufrière, we could see the curvature of the earth on the ocean’s horizon. It’s easy to see Guadeloupe in Krishna’s impressionist renderings of Caribbean life. Currently he lives in seclusion in the south of France, focusing on painting.
Digitals available from Italo Moderni’s Bandcamp.
Ciel and Ali Berger - Damn Skippy! EP [Jacktone]
Big Captain Planet energy on this one. Five homies brandish their elemental bling, combining powers to conjure forth one of the year’s best records. Ciel’s (Fire) sometimes-scorching, sometimes-cozy progressive steez finds fuel in Ali Berger’s (Wind) mercurial, wide-ranging experimentalism to cook up three varied originals. The A-side houses mild, grooving spacers, ‘Damn Skippy!’ and ‘Mise-En-Scène’. The latter is particularly good and lives up to its name with a gentle, welcoming mood to help set the scene on dancefloors in need of warming.
‘Ive Been Reaching for the Stars’ is the most logical uniting of the pair’s styles. Ciel’s driving, muscle-tek meld with Ali’s penchant for loopy, hardware-driven Detroit techno to make a machine funk roller with one foot in the oldschool and one in the new. The bottom end packs the punch while the rest calmly levitates on a cute bloopy synth lead and reversed vocal sample. Both banger and not, it’s a real choose-your-own-adventure.
Tbh, I don’t know Nikki Nair (Water) besides seeing his name on many records these days. His remix is where this metaphor falters but I want him to feel included so he gets an element too. He flips ‘Stars’ into a 160 bpm stripped footwork-indebted cruiser that’s a bit out of my wheelhouse but complements the record nicely while introducing new flavors.
Davis Galvin (Earth) stomps onto the scene with the B3 remix of ‘Stars’, redeeming this kitsch write-up and delivering an absolute stunner. Flora and fauna are summoned from the four winds. Various pronged herd animals lope across the sunlit savannah with power and grace. Wild grasses, flowers and baobab trees surge skyward from the turf at time-lapse speeds. Talmudic trainspotters swear DJ God wheeled this one up on the sixth day (Saturday night). Euphoric and organic, it’s a top-form embodiment of Davis’ like-no-other sound.
This plate of heat comes courtesy of all around Top Humans’, Doc Sleep and Darren Cutlip (Heart, duh!), Jacktone imprint. Both have exuded nothing but kind vibrations in our few interactions and IRL meets over the years – energies they’ve somehow channeled into audio form here. Support this team of elemental warriors at the Jacktone Bandcamp.
SKAT - Skat Mode [Euphoric State]
The aesthetics of dance music in 2022 owe a large debt to the stylings of Andy Panayi and Alec Stone, most known for their A² and Stopouts (with Rob Collman) projects. Emerging in 1993 with a lowkey whitey labelled “SKAT” the duo began pushing a sound totally their own – hypercolored, melodic, tek’d-out takes on everything from deep house to electro. From then until the Great Collapse of the early naughts, Andy and Alec carved a humble niche for themselves in the UK with trend-eschewing, heads-down productions that plumbed the genre spaces of hardcore, house, ukg, tech house, techno and electro. The resulting discography of DIY plates on their own An Alien imprint and Robin Ball’s Groovepressure left a crumb trail eagerly followed and consumed by current label owners and DJs keen on mining the treasure trove of tunes past. A² reemerged in 2015 with the aptly titled Resurgence EP on Traffic, vaulting them to the vanguard of a movement pushing melody, emotion and funk which would inject European techno and tech house with the needed inspiration to pull the scene out of the mnml doldrums of the millennium’s first decade.
Looking back, the Resurgence EP (along with other Traffic originals of that year) stands out in my mind as the moment when new records became exciting (again). The vault doors to dance musics rich history were thrown open and droves of producers flocked in. The minimalism of tech house, Rominimal and dub techno were replaced with euphoric flourishes from 90’s – breakbeats, melody, vocals and all the other serotonin-conjuring sounds of earlier years. A tidal wave of fresh music crashed into shops and A² had helped kick out the crumbling floodwalls of convention. The scene was set for a new generation of producers like Roza Terenzi, Luca Lozano and Gene on Earth to make their mark with the updated sounds of futures past.
Andy and Alec rode the tide, repressing all of their sought-after An Alien 12”s, liberally licensing vault material for reissue on other labels and, most crucially, resumed producing, fueling the zeitgeist with fresh tunes. Unlike so many producers who reenter the studio after a 15 year hiatus, the boys didn’t skip a beat. The deluge of releases since can only leave one to guess which tracks are from dusty DATs and which are fresh out the kitchen.
By now this “review” is turning out to be more of an A² retrospective and an elegy to the late great Andy Panayi, who died of cancer in 2020. Respect where respect is due, but back to SKAT. Two of the original tunes (‘Is Dis Love’ and ‘Dinowarp’) are reissued here . There’s no info on the other two and, like so much of their material, they could have been produced in 1993 or 2023. No matter, it’s all heat. The original tunes are post-hardcore, jak’n deep house with a gentle touch of prog – the product of minds warped on British XTC intensity turning towards mellower American sounds. The B-side ups the energy, peaking in the steppin’, neon tech house of ‘Jump Around’, which, if indeed was produced in 1993, would be, like most of the A² oeuvre, massively ahead of its time.
Loopchaser - Lunagenesis [TerraFirm]
“If you don’t have something nice to say don’t say anything at all” is a credo that I try (emphasis: try) to enact IRL but I’ve stepped it up a notch here and made it a guiding principle in my posts. What’s the point of wasting digital inches on stuff I don’t enjoy? Best case scenario I’m pissing away my time on negativity. Medium to worst case it’s shit-talk that will offend, enrage, embarrass and generally darken the planetary vibrations. THAT SAID, today I inform all my shooters: the hit is out on the cookie-cutter, Y2K Trance / Progressive (‘Trog’) revivalist records that are eating up large swathes of dance music real estate. That shit sucked the first time and there’s no improving on what is a fundamentally flawed recipe. To break it down: ‘progressive’ inherently denotes innovation in aesthetics and innovation certainly is not part of the Trog ethos. ‘Trance’ is equally at odds. Anyone that’s been in the psycho-spiritual state of trance – whether through hypnotherapy, mysticism or a really good DJ set – knows the state is only achieved slowly, with great care and skill and any effort to expedite the process takes one further from the prize. The deferral of gratification necessary to achieve an expanded state of consciousness is anathema to Trog’s aggressive clawing for immediate results.
I cast a pretty wide net when it comes to following new releases. New labels, unfamiliar names and stuff with cool art (Trog’s patented honey-pot) are all given a shot in the hopes of discovering something new. This approach paid off greatly this year, but for every out-of-the-blue percy I found I had to wade thru five or more ham-fisted, open-filter Trog ‘bombs’ that made my daily perusal of new records tedious instead of exciting.
Gripping the wheel to steer this rant into constructive territory, I put forth a suggestion. DJs, producers, dancers: progress, entrance and be entranced, but don’t force it. The deferral of instant, cheap gratification in favor of delayed but immensely more profound experience is a required skill for enjoying the breadth of what life has on offer. As contradictory as this notion is to the always-on nature of modern life, it is also the solution to and the escape from modernity’s discontents. So, dear reader, skip that glistening, saccharine Trog plate with the wicked / ironic artwork and pickup one of this year’s many (lower case ‘p’) progressive / trance-inducing releases that were made with patience, craftsmanship and innovation through individuality.
Davis Galvin comes to mind. Check out the above-mentioned remix or their Meratana 3-track Bandcamp release. Clock the zoomin’, exploratory constructions of Rudolf C or Roza Terenzi and D. Tiffany. Kalahari Oyster Cult is always good for several mind-expanding excursions per year (Fantastic Man, Picture, off the top). But, if limited to a single tip, I’d urge you with the most urgent of urgings to drop whatever it is you are doing and buy the new Loopchasers EP out now on crazy, sexy, cool label, TerraFirm.
For real though, Ciel and Priori sidestepped all the Trog pitfalls in putting together this measured yet propulsive plate of music. Whether you are at sea level or exiting orbit, each of the four tracks elevates, guiding your ascent toward astral travel. I feel like both Cindy’s and Francis’ prowess and accomplishments precede them and preclude me from writing anything that would gas-up their already rocket-fueled careers in music. So I’ll just say it’s been a pleasure and privilege to release their music. If intelligence, nuance and craft funneled into the service of creating forward-thinking, entrancing music is your thing, I humbly suggest this as your record of the year :)
Digis available on Bandcamp and wax in all cool and woke retailers.
More November Heat:
Idjut Boys - Portion Out of Control [Droid] : Four crunchy, unhinged Chicago-school body trips.
Dirty Blends 006 & 007 [Dirty Blends] : Traxx continues to rip it on his Nation sublabel. Twisted jakbeat excursions in true Muzik Box tradition.
Italoboyz - Episode #17 : dark, steppin, sleazy tech house for freakzone-use only
Cor.ece - Dance to Keep from Crying [Razor-N-Tape Reserve] : a vocal house anthem when the world needs it most. Magical and necessary love artillery.
Galvanica - Nightlife in Japan [Best Record Italy] : Top reissue of vocal Italo bomb in four varied mixes.