Posted by Budgie at June 16, 2005 01:37 PM

Digital Echoes...

There have only been 2 albums I've been playing this week. One is Kraftwerk's great live album, "Minimum Maximum", the other is an excellent, and free, compilation album entitled "Flow.ers".

They have both complimented each other rather nicely. Both seem to be about the exploration of minimal ideas but pushed as far as you can take them. Kraftwerk doing so with their clinical, but catchy electronics and "Flow.ers" doing so with the spacious sound of digital dub.

"Flow.ers" is a compilation on the Lithuanian internet label Sutemos. Home to all sorts of genres of electronica, this compilation aims to "put the most beautiful minimal/ambient/dubby down tempo music into one piece that would flow from the start to the very end".

Starting with the disembodied echoes of Krill Minima's "Pfloez" and ending with the micro clicks and ambience of Ozy's "Sugar", "Flow.ers" drifts off on a journey exploring the many sounds of ambient and digital dub whilst giving a passing nod and a cheery wave to the Basic Channel boys...

Track : OCTEX - "OTNEMEM"

Basic Channel is a good reference point for this album and the track above. Taking their musical cues from Detroit Techno and Jamaican Dub, the Basic Channel guys created a strange hybrid of both musics that was at once recognisable but at the same time incredibly alien.

Octex, short for Organic Crackle And Tone Experiments, is a young, award winning producer from Slovenia. With "Otnemem", he follows that Basic Channel blueprint. What at first sounds minimal turns out to be a dense aural soup of clicks, hisses, sounds and rhythms all bubbling away and echoing all over the top of one another whilst trying to be restrained by some warm drawn out chords. It's all very hypnotic and your concentration is constantly being pulled in all sorts of directions trying to focus on the emerging musical patterns. It keeps building and building into some sort of dub crescendo around the 5 minute mark where it gets joined by a 4/4 beat. The funny thing about this is that the beat can sometimes sneak up on you and can make your brain think that it is out of time with the constant pulsating rhythms and the remainder of the track...

It makes for a great centrepiece on the album.

Go Visit : Octex
Go Visit : Sutemos.Net (zipped download file of the album and more info on the artists involved on "Flow.ers" can be found there.)

Feel free to leave a comment about this track in The Pipe section of the forum

Ta,
Budgie.