Podcast: Download

Broadcast #016

***New Signal****

1. Hrvatski - vatstep dsp
2. John Baker – Vendetta:The Ice Cream Man
3. Pedestrian - Arrest the President
4. Poirier - WHA LA LA LENG
5. Big Black – Kerosene
6. Lorn - Army of Fear
7. Z’EV Vs Pita – live in Colchester
8. Bong-Ra – Terrorizah
9. Herbaliser (ft. MF Doom) – It aint Nuttin
10. Dissolved - Why don’t you make Maremire ?
11. Busdriver - Imaginary Places
12. Simple Vehicle – Dipped
13. Cleric - A Rush of Blood

If you want us to play your band/noise/whatever, drop us a line at behindcloseddoors@sittingnow.co.uk.

Peace

***Signal Ends**

Podcast: Download

Broadcast 005

***New Signal****

The Siegfried Sassoon – Muscle Beach

That Fucking Tank -Keanu Reef

Black Saturn – My New Spacesuit

Earth – Ourobourus

Dissolved – New Year Brings An Intracellular Tracer

This Ain’t Vegas – Ku Jumping

Folchen- The Believers

Phantom Float – teeth

Fibla – Montsianell

Lovvers – Wasted Youth

Mare – Anisette

Mochipet – thizznation.

If you want us to play your band/noise/whatever, drop us a line at behindcloseddoors@sittingnow.co.uk.

Peace

***Signal Ends**

The workaholic Scotsman returns with another serving of complex ambient electronica. Introverted synth lines mesh with intricate drum programming and layered melodies to create a strangely familiar but rewarding album. It follows on from the recent double album “Emit Like A Prothonotary” and is quite similar in tone, in that it sounds like Dissolved but given a fresh coat of paint and a couple of new keyboards. It doesn’t stray from the territory he has made his own, but a successful formula can’t really be argued with in his case.

Highlights on the album are “Sondrophet” with its dripping synths and dank cave atmospherics, “Gifted Mantis” with its collapsing, barely audible beats and vaguely insectile sound. “Nymphing” which is the bastard offspring of a secret collaboration between Autechre at their most paranoid and Dissolved at his most obtuse, with hectic broken beats and hissy drones. “Glint From An Eprom Oil Shroud” reuses the brilliant kids keyboard sound used in “Fentrostic Girl Storm” (from an earlier release), a sound so innately cheerful that it makes me want to run up to strangers and stick my headphones in their ears so they can be cheerful too. “Needle Rain” is another ambient / industrial mood fest with scattered, invasive and glitchy beats. “New Year Brings An Intracellular Tracer” is my out and out highlight from this album and I put it in the self-invented pigeon hole of hyper-kinetic math-rave. It represents Dissolved at both his most focussed and aggressive and is one of the tunes I would bring out in attempting to convert people to his work.

Moments that troubled me were rare but it’s worth mentioning that I was very intrigued by the opening of “Ideomotor Action Disrupter”, it builds in a clanky and harsh fashion and has all the makings of a Dissolved classic but falls apart under the weight of an unwieldy bassline which is just too much for my delicate ears to process. The only other flaw, and it is very minor, is that just as I was getting into “Lantern For The Myasmic” it uncharacteristically faded away leaving me feeling slightly cheated on this one track. There are also some moments on the album from which you come away slightly unmoved, but they do serve the purpose of breaking the album up and providing light and shade.

Despite having releases in the double figures Dissolved is still making music that while sometimes flawed, is always possessed of dark energy and is always interesting, and for that and innumerable other reasons you should begin getting hold of his older albums and EP’s from http://www.dissolvedamberrooms.com

Finally, I would like to ask and answer the following questions. Is this an exceptional Dissolved album? No. Is it the one I would recommend first? No. Is it free and should that make it an essential download for anyone bothering to read this review? Yes. Is it representative of how good electronica can be in the tired old year of 2009? Yes.

Kim Monaghan

When I first found Dissolved on the internet I umm-ed and aah-ed about listening to his music. He had lots of plays, but that means dick all on MySpace (Lily Allen anyone?) and (for me) the name Dissolved conjured up a cheesy goth-metal band. I eventually got round to listening and realized how wrong I had been.

Dissolved purveys complex, emotional music that swings between wistful melancholia, dreamy ambient and harsh electronica, all garnished with tape effects and field recordings that mostly seem to be taken from his own life (family Christmases, visits to very strange sounding libraries etc). This makes his music very personal, and one thing I have learned from listening to his thirteen odd albums and E.P’s is that Dissolved only makes music for one reason, and that is because he is one of those (lucky ?) people who are compelled to. Just as some people have to paint, run or smoke, Dissolved has to make music. This means that while you can level some criticism at him for sometimes being too intricate, or for over-reliance on certain “tricks”, you would have to have ears of cloth to think that any of his tunes were ever born from anything other than love (or possibly a little bit of madness). His fecundity can be overwhelming though because, when faced with so many releases, each laden with long song titles and obscure scientific terminology, it is not easy to know where to start. I had this problem, and it pissed me off that it might stop people listening to him, so I thought “he needs a greatest hits”. To this end I put together a podcast of all my favourite bits from previous releases, which you can find at http://daddytank.podbean.com  

This latest release is, in some ways, a perfect introduction to the opaque world of Dissolved. At twenty four tracks spread over the double album (twelve tracks on each of the red and black discs), it was hard to make sense of it at first. After the first two listens I had the first disc pegged as being OK (with some great bits), while the second disc was fantastic and had some of his best tunes on. It was only on the third listen that I realized how well this album reflects the spectrum of Dissolved to date. Beat-less, drone-y ambient (“Body Spill From The Cinema”/ “Sentinent Chemostream”) and short melodic interludes (“Letter Light” / “Passing The Radar”) intermingle with “classic” Dissolved (“Lithology Induced A Multinucleate Angel”/ “Horses’s Name Is Too Long”).

While some of the album can be said to be fairly standard fare from the man (and don’t let “standard” read as “average” here), this album has some of my favourite new Dissolved tracks, showcasing some experimental touches that promise a whole new side to him, while staying within clearly defined territory. Tracks like the marvellous “Hospital Manifester” with its eerie synths and spidery beats, “Capillary Action” with its stuttering, perpetual motion feel and “Auntie Convulsion”, one of the most sinister and wonderful things to come from his mind, sounding like Blair Witch sound-tracked by Autechre. The highlight of the album though (and my new personal favourite) is “Transgressive Etching”. Trademark synths and off kilter beats offer a classic Dissolved opening passage, but all of a sudden there appears this tiny, tremulous voice singing the vocal. Not a professional voice by any means but honest and full of genuine emotion that lifts the track into greatness, especially once it collides with the  sliced up breaks that suddenly punch their way through skittering electronic beats.

It’s not just the music that should entice you however. This album cost seven quid, with artwork by Dissolved, a hand numbered (and signed) photograph included and a limited run of 94 copies. It is a powerful argument against all of the things wrong with music nowadays and an even more powerful argument for persuading people to listen to Dissolved. Why download faceless .mp3 files when you can buy a work of heartfelt love and genuine art?

Check the Dissolved website here, or his Myspace here

Daddy Tank