Showing posts with label Ghost Rave. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ghost Rave. Show all posts

Sunday 4 July 2021

The Assembled Minds - Dirty Workshop Magick


Mathew 'Patterned Air' Saunders released a bunch of stuff recently under his fabulous moniker The Assembled Minds onto bandcamp. I've known for a while that he's had a stack of unreleased material waiting around have I? I think I even told some people to sign him up or was that Position Normal? Perhaps both*. My influence can't be that far reaching though as Mathew has released these himself. Hey I gave it a go! Anyway after purchasing all the everything which is both old & new, I'm just stuck on the first digital album I put through the bluetooth speakers. 

That's this terrific compilation DIRTY WORKSHOP MAGICK. First of all: Best album title in the haunty-logic game since Mordant Music's Dead Air. This compilation contains tracks that The Assembled Minds contributed to other compilations over the last seven years. So we get six trax from 2015 to 2020. Assembled Minds came to CardroosManiac2 prominence in 2016 with their brilliant LP Creaking Haze & Other Rave Ghosts which was a Top 10 LP in my end of year list. The brilliant second track The Face In The Mirror Is Not Mine made my 2016 Top 5 tunes list. So if you're across the goodness of this fine music you're in luck here.

"...a half remembered misty rural rave among blurry faced dancers with only their teeth shining bright in a marsh that might not have even existed, where you never belonged. Suddenly your brain connected 'ardcore to the sinister/anodyne conjured by the brown British world of 70s homemade telly where Radiophonica was surreptitiously squished in. In this moment library theme tunes mutated into hardcore rave trax that weren't in this dimension but a possible world of parallels between raves. Seven buttered english muffin people hunted you until you arrived back in an urban town planning nightmare as the suburban lights glowed in the early AMs, comforted by the cars splashing by in the night rain. Feeling good that all this never happened except did it? It's all a dilapidated sound and vision but weren't your parents synthesiser robots? Who've now rusted into squeaky regressed babies. Now including the super soundz of helium voices incorporated with vague slowed down distressed monSTer tones? Were you ever anywhere? Is your brain just an experiment inside a chipped tea cup within a room where the windows have no outside? So wrap yourself up in a beautifully patterned 70s curtain, but hang on, it's just withering satanic wallpaper turning into the ashes of that fireman's suit you'd stolen from an unknown village's station. Weren't you going to wear that to a rural rave at a misty marsh as you couldn't find an actual train driver's outfit in time. There was a whistle in your pocket though... I'll come to you... " 
[This is an excerpt from Tim's Haunted Bollocks Fiction] 

Dirty Workshop Magick is a 6 piece sonic jigsaw. A transmission of shadows of music's former self from this dimension, I think.
  

*Unfortunately amnesia has crept into some of my memory zones so I'm not sure anymore what I thought I knew or whether I even did the things I thought I did. The scans are fine but that's about what it rules in now as opposed to what it rules out! As many less sinister things have recently been ruled out. Now that I think about it, that's very Haunty-Logical although it's definately (sic) not fun or awesome. It's frightening.   

Monday 14 April 2014

Don't Touch That Stereo Part I


Millie & Andrea - Drop The Vowels (2014)
This is one of the dudes from Demdike Stare and some other bloke. For some reason I'm really enjoying this record which I didn't really expect to. I don't think anything much new is happening here. There a bit of post dubstep, some gamelan vibes, isolationist type ambience, a dose of Basic Channel, hardcore continuum styles, drum & bass pops its head up, tech-house (that was a thing wasn't it for a minute there in the 90s?) and I dunno it's all a bit zombie rave (that should so be a genre). Not really hands up in the air more like your arms fall off as you try to raise them above your waste. Is it undeconstructed or reconstuctured deconstruction or constructed unreconstruction? More to the point does anyone give a shit at this point? More nails in the coffin for rave in the best possible sense.

Clouds - Ghost System Rave (2013)
A bit late on this one. Ghost System Rave was only hipped to me in early January by Reynolds via Energy Flash. This is far and away the best album I missed last year, the only other contender being Holden's The Inheritors. It most certainly would have made my top 9. As far as album titles that describe their contents go this is perfection. Whilst the ingredients suggest the 90s, something pulls this away from mere retro-activity. Perhaps Future 1 is the only exception to that rule here as it soundz like an obscure 91 grimey 'ardcore gem that Blog To The Old Skool might have dug up. Ghost System Rave is not just techno micro-genres revisited. Its like you're hearing an early 90s rave through a ghost's ears. You feel like you've heard it before but you haven't, not like this. This is a delightfully askew musical experience. It sounds/feels like you've already dropped the drugs and you're occupying an inbetween dimension. This is an incredible musical achievement. Rave from the otherside. We just had Zombie Rave and now this is Ghost Rave.