Snoopy is hard to follow up. The same brilliant musicality is lavished on Orange — a combination of unmistakably original, skittering drum programming, startlingly fresh instrumental interjections, creepily invocatory voices, and dubwise treatments — giddily imbued with the dark arts of ritual and seance. But Orange is more gripping, focussed and urgent, more intense and ambitious. Next level.

Its first quarter presents a trio of forays in suspense.
Bassline squares up like an epic psych-funk grinder, with a moody guitar line traversed by ticking drum patterns and faint electric crackle. In no time the guitar is staggering and stammering under the duress of echo and distortion, and over-run with percussive electronics and the first of the voices massing in the music’s head. The mood has quickly become more trepidatious. We’re deeper underground; it’s gloomier, wetter.
Shred propulsively ratchets up the tension and menace. Glazily tentative xylophone is played against slashing, nervy cello. The voices are more strangulated and sick now. Flutes and chimes evoke the same kind of beautiful, contaminated efflorescence which is pictured on the LP’s front cover.
Voice Of The Spider makes easier progress across this cavernous, shadowy, dripping terrain, with funky pads and Nasty, eighties, No Wave electric bass; woozy chimes, non-plussed keys, singing-in-tongues.

Pink Mist marks an arrival, or unbottling, with annunciatory church-organ and choral voices from the off, and a newly relaxed, head-nodding kosmische rhythm.

Mandarin is a short, beat-less and voice-free interlude for piano and bass. It’s reflective and nostalgic, ambivalent and inconclusive, with a lovely snatch of melody. A bridge half-way.

Would You Like A Vampire is a triumphant, mesmerizing go at New Folk, with strummed acoustic guitar, descant song, and jazzily restless drum programming (including a tasty bass-bin trembler). Amazingly, Conrad Standish is joined at the mic by none other than Bridget St John. Together they sing ‘Earth is Paradise’ so repeatedly and tremulously — and the song is cut off so abruptly at the end — it seems as if the verb is teetering on the past tense, and hymn fading into valediction and catastrophe.

In the same line of thought, Storm Rips Banana Tree begins idyllically enough, with a CS-&-Kreme-style raga… before something like an immense, obliterative drill starts up. Harpsichord and organ — by James Rushford — and flutes, and clapping, distant chanting and insectile percussion steadily leaven the dread, till finally all that is left is lapping water.
It’s an epic, deeply immersive, compelling, thought-provoking, twenty-minute finale… the coup de grâce.

With a Regis remix.

You can’t make sense of this, clicking through mp3s, on tin-pan computer speakers. Put the record on, though, and set the controls for the heart of the bloke next door, and it’s terrific. The drum-less, throbbing, droning, wailing, sawing, twinkling reconnaissance of Nothing, with massive, unnerving swoops, throttling and surges.
Beatrice Dillon and Kassem Mosse.
Great photos by Anne Tetzlaff on the sleeve.

Prime Cuts from the legendary Scratch Perverts crew with an upful six-tracker, full of life and intelligence, and teeming with fidgety, DIY, turntablist energy.
For us it’s a bit like a raid on the racks at Honest Jons, over the decades… but fresh and bright. It kicks off with a headlong garbling of eighties jazz-funk, complete with synths, a vocoder, and some incipient Herbie, all sagging woozily into some nuts pitch control, before a mean beat-down. Some dubwise Channel One follows up, with almightily anthemic snatches of melody and unmistakable chords, almost breaking down under a barrage of skittering effects, scratching, laser-fire, strangulated melodica, and cowbell. Then three excursions in classic Detroit techno: moody electro funk, with a sprinkling of Harold Faltermeyer; hard-grooving minimalism, with a dash of It Takes Two; then a more industrial outing, with clattering percussion and gobbling synth. Finally an ambient interlude — overcast but twinklingly ambivalent — to close.
Ace. A lot of fun. Check it out.

Kassem Mosse worries.

This deadly Berlin—New Jersey nexus back in action, reinforced by the mighty Shifted.
F Planet itself is an in-for-the-kill stomper, husky and frantic, its sizzling bass and clanky hats inexorably dissolving in a sulphuric alarm of distortion and haywire bleeps. Astral Pilot ties you into a swirl of frequencies, rhythms and mechanical growling, before finally disentangling itself into some kind of cosmic lift-off. On the flip, grimly tightening the bolts, setting the controls inwards, and darkening and thickening its atmospheres into a kind of gut-churning possession, Shifted makes F Planet all his own.

A second killer Trilogy EP from DJT in Japan, advancing the legacy of Chain Reaction.
Serious, emotionally reined-in music; structurally minimal, linear and open-ended, without the puppeteering routines of most dance music… but all the more enthralling and grooving, with hefty bass. The sense of monumental, weather-distressed, darkening dread is counter-balanced by this forward momentum, and expertly dubwise light-and-shade, with layered detail.
The reverberative, gong-like tolling of the opener gives way on the flip to machines starting up in a cavernous space, like vast beating wings, with a tumping bottom end, over nine minutes.
In-between is a more atmospheric and tentative interval, with slowly roiling synths and near-and-far, morse-code percussion.
Ace.

‘A new twist to the Don’t DJ sound. Leftfield tribalism at its best, with a pinch of Zoviet France fourth world voodoo for the 5am crew that wants to get hazy in the dance. A drum ritual of epic proportions.
‘Then Morgan Buckley — from the mighty Wah Wah Wino crew — takes up this deep and intense trip…  and goes ballistic. He peppers the original with some live Bodhran drumming to invoke the ancient Celtic spirits. If the essence of a remix is to keep the original vibe of the tune and add a different flavour to it, Morgan Buckley nailed it in a big way.’

You can hear their stage experience in ‘the sizzle and swing of the percussive highlights here, programmed with a serious depth and wriggle that reflect both an extension of and return to form. Considerations of the machine-human interface, neurological realities and physical probabilities dominate. But these tracks are economical and precise, glittering with emotional depth and cinematic effects. The album’s core, a three-act movement of symphonic uncertainty and revelation, marks one of the pair’s most evocative compositions in a career full of them.’

Killer, epic, driving techno, mined and honed from classic Trax.
Silk-screened sleeves, very limited; it’s a must.

Silent Servant from Sandwell District on call; and a Ventress.