214 Vinyl & CDs

Review: Netherlands mainstay Frustrated Funk comments with these tunes that, "My log saw something, something significant... Shut your eyes and you will burst into flames." You won't of course, but the dance floor might when you drop the textured, haunting late-night electro funker 'Easing Into The Night'. 'Movement In Stillness' is a quicker, slicker groove with icy synth lines and myriad alien details in the spaces between the beats. Last but not least, 'OS4SFI' layers up bubbling synth lines with more brilliant snares and a cruising groove.

Review: Extramusical hugeness from Texas's best experimental electro outing, Science Cult. A name like 'Commuting Observables', when lent to a V/A mini-album, is abstract enough to immerse us in the implied concept; it conjures a mental image of a glaucous laboratory of sorts, in which a cadre of sonic mad scientists toil tirelessly to yield the batch of effervescent sense-smushers you hear here. Be warned, this isn't your bog-standard, one-or-two-part acid-analog jam EP; no, every track and alias here plays out like a different iteration of some carefully spliced yet still egregious biogenetic experiment; monster faunamechs bursting free from their respective vitreal nutri-vats, and embarking on respective misanthropic rampages, all leaving trails of mimetic polyalloy gunge behind them. Were we to choose one of said bio-beasts as our fighter, it'd have to be Syrte's 'I'm A T-Shirt', shortly run up by a tie between Fleck Esc' 'Unrefined Intentions' and Ben Pest's 'From AU'. But we have to say, none of this music is standard fare techno: all of it is really quite wild.