amnesia shredder

I really enjoyed Another Life and Amnesia Scanner are nice guys with an interesting line of patter

But this is a pretty devastating slag-off of their new "EDM-adjacent" effort Tearless here by Robert Barry  for the Quietus

"If I'm honest I think what I liked about them was that they basically sounded like Skrillex but were somehow less embarrassing to namedrop. I mean, fuck it, 'Scary Monsters And Nice Sprites' is kind of a tune in a rather crude, brash, dumb sort of way. That first Amnesia Scanner record, when it comes down to it, is no less dumb. But it is a lot less colourful and playful. It's a kind of po-faced Skrillex....

"...  their new album sounds uncannily like a Limp Bizkit B-sides collection.... The likes of Korn and Papa Roach always seemed to thrive on a particular kind of impotent acting-out, a carefully cultivated image of transgression pieced together in the most sterile laboratory conditions. Wacky haircuts and red-faced gurning. There was a lot of foot stomping. But at least, I guess, they could be bothered to try and look like they cared."

I dimly remember someone doing a very detailed structural-musicological analysis comparing nu-metal and .... not EDM precisely, but brostep - and concluding that they were more or less the same thing.



Here's a counter-(re)view, from Chal Ravens, for Pitchfork, that is more positive if still not exactly making the record sound like a lot of fun really.

"Where Another Life felt bright and alert, shimmying towards oblivion like lemmings in a conga line, Tearless is burned out and overwhelmed. This is ugly music, even at its most melodic. The shadow of nu-metal and hardcore hangs over tracks like “Flat,” a collaboration with metalcore act Code Orange, where busted electronic drums and shredded guitars recall Deftones and Nine Inch Nails. On “AS Tearless” a chant-along punk riff is torn to pieces by distortion.... 

"... Aside from those sharply focused highlights ["AS Acá", "AS Going"] and a brief climax of power chords and blast beats on “AS Labyrinth,” the atmosphere is claggy and subdued. Tearless ends as it began, in slow, exhausted strides. “You will be fine if we can help you lose your mind,” sings a distorted, uncredited voice on the final track, a lighters-in-the-air lament for the party at the end of the world."

I suppose it's the ultimate strategic-slumming move in the hip taste game - to not just hone in on the kinds of dance music that are most demeaned as "it's just the new heavy metal" (gabber, hardstyle, etc - lumpen-rock-like in fantasy heroics, mid-freq blare, speed, punitive splattersthetic, trashy pulp graphics, puerility) but to go all the way across and directly interface with metal and its descendants directly.

shoegazetronica

Says Chal Ravens, "really enjoying The Primitive Painter reissue coming on Apollo – glittering cybertech waters, distant polygonal islands, '90s digiutopics, that sort of thing"

Now I was wondering if the artist name (an alter ego for Alter Ego, apparently - i'm stealing a Youtuber's quip here) was a reference to Felt

... and thought "nah, more likely it's directly referring  to Lascaux"

But lookee here, a nod to The Waterboys

and "Cathedral" - as in the proverbial "sonic cathedral" for 4AD-ish religiose reverb aesthetic?

Felt had this proximately titled song

and this even more proximately titled song




ah - and, stop press - as Cesar in comments points out, there is also this Felt song 

so clearly formatively rooted in mid-80s Anglo-indie this The Primitive Painter chap - or chaps, rather, since Alter Ego = duo 

now I'm wondering if that song is named after the House of Love offshoot captained by Terry Bickers of vitreous-guitar showering you with crystalline splinters renown?

The shoegaze into post-rock evolution is well documented and logical

But the shoegaze into the electronic listening music / chill out / IDM side of techno is less delineated

Chapterhouse got that album remixed by somebody or other IDM-ish (Global Communications? Future Sound of London? )

Morr Music

a German friend of mine Heiko Hoffmann - long time editor of electronic music magazine Groove, until recently - did a shoegaze compilation back in 2003

the texturitis and blissy feeling of dreampop / shoegaze was a gateway drug for E-lectronic dance and non-dance, for some, maybe

for me as a writer, maybe that applies too - texture-attentiveness (texture > text) vis-a-vis MBV et al, sets me up well for texturrythm-attentiveness about rave .... ditto "the politics of ecstasy" becomes "the politics of Ecstasy" (although in both cases I would say now that it's more like an "anti-politics" - for better or worse, and increasingly, i think worse) 

but as a listener I was into club music and synth-abetted funk right from the start of the 80s

and in fact would write about things like Mantronix  in that engineer-as-poet / new sonic architecture mode well before I became a raver - at the exact same time as I was hymning A.R. Kane in similar sort of terms (not man-machinic but certainly the human figure disappearing into the miasma of sound)

same kind of becoming-abstract, depersonalized, sensation-not-significance approach

"against interpretation" (before I'd even read Sontag's essay)

Deleuzian, before I'd ever cracked open A Thousand Plateaux 

one instinctively know what is right

and this was the right response to what the music was doing 




the missus reviewed this gig (where they were supported by The House of Love) 

later we saw Felt's final gig together 

ambient trap, dolphin drill

liquid gangsta

Chal Ravens frets over this Fat Trel track's street-nihilist allure in a piece at FACT that attempts to "redefine the guilty pleasure"