12 February 2006

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Albums and Singles

This is the kind of debut that knocks on the door of Kranky andConstellation only to be carried directly into the pressing plant on asilver platter decorated with rose petals. This six tracker from mwvm(aka Michael Walton) shows a grasp of the ‘isms’ (minimalism, hypnotismand droneism) that’s already beyond the reach of acts with six times asmany members.

(self released)

Themusic of Mwvm drifts out on the outer surface of song and orbitsthrough the trails and pulls of larger musical institutions. Throughfreezing cold deep space “Relayed in Stars” trembles like the mile backdetritus of the Nostromo as a shower of rock cuts through waveringeffects. The sliding drones and restrained strum drifts could beslivers from a Ry Cooder soundtrack.
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12 February 2006

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Albums and Singles

A rerelease from 2000, $100 Room is awkward, rough, and soundslike a demo recorded on a crappy 4-track in someone's rec room—andit's also beautiful. The cover image echoes the songs inside: roughlyscrawled and amatuerish, but sweetly so.


Hush

Singer/songwriter Ben Barnett produces spare, emotionalpop/rock, and Kind of Like Spitting is what every high school emo bandthinks they are. The music goes from simple, quiet country-tinged folk to raging guitarsthat nearly overwhelm Barnett's plaintive and charmingly-out-of-tunevocals. The often-poetic lyrics speak of sadness, hope, love, anddeath.

Barnett repeats a handful of lines in three songs—"Hook," Hoax," and "Cater"—but eachtime there's a different spin. They make up the complete lyrics of"Hook" and "Hoax," the spin there given by the titles; the line "You socomplete, so much cooler than me" takes on a new light when considering the song title.The closing track, a cover of Billy Bragg's "Little Time Bomb" fitswell with the band's sound and meshes easily with the rest of the album.

The overriding feeling throughout $100 Room is one ofsomeone trying to find his way through a sometimes desolate world, butstill he's finding it. A statement from the liner notes sums it up forme: "Live long. Love as much as you can."

samples:

• 26 is Too Soon
• Yes, You're Busted
• Little Time Bomb

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12 February 2006

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Albums and Singles

One of my main criticisms of Merzbow is the lack of quality control. Everything he records seems to be released whether it’s good or bad. The idea of good noise, however, is oxymoronic, but in comparing this release to some of his better works and other more fruitful collaborations, it nearly ends up as a complete dud. Akita’s contribution is nothing but “Merzbow by Numbers” and only some deft work by Tamarin makes this record anything more than bargain bin fodder.

Artficial Music Machine

The concept behind this album is straightforward: Merzbow rearrangesTamarin material into new songs and Tamarin does the same with Merzbow.Like a lot of Merzbow’s current output, this album is based more aroundbeats than an all out assault on the ears. I don’t have a problem withAkita’s forays into beats but he’s done it better before (the recentalbum Merzbuta being possibly the peak of this particular direction). The opening track “Processed 3” starts off with a good beat and some nice noises that sound like digitised cicadas. That’s about as interesting as it gets.

Merzbow should be wearing the listener down but I felt the music was being worn down; becoming  meek and limp. The tones change on the beat slowly over the course of twelve minutes before fuzzing out into all out noise (quelle surprise!). It is a very poor track. The other two Merzbow tracks are equally dull. All three tracks just smack of sheer laziness; there has been absolutely no effort at making any sort of interesting compositions. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Merzbow had a sweatshop somewhere with a hundred people forced to record generic Merzbowisms using various pieces of electronic equipment.

Tamarin’s half of the CD fares much better. It has a lot morecharacter than the Merzbow tracks. “Untitled 1” sounds like a glitchyrecording of solar flares in a wind tunnel. There is a lushness andspacious feeling to the sounds; it was a joy to listen to after theprevious half hour of crap. “Untitled 2” starts off with a menacing andextremely low drone, after a short while it is joined by a niceclarinet, sounding like a lonely sailor in a sea that is about turninto a heaving mass of waves. The build up to this crash iselectrifying. Static slowly erupts like the warning rattle of arattlesnake. The storm never fully arrives, it’s almost like a tantrictempest, the feeling of impending doom is far more exciting than theactual event.

Tamarin has demonstrated a far more skilful approach to remixing Merzbow’s work than Merzbow has managed with Tamarin. Too bad Merzbow Vs. Tamarin wasn’t made into two separate EPs, the last three tracks are really wonderful in their use of sound but the first half of the CD is so disgracefully amateur that it is painful to listen to and not in the usual way.

samples:

• Merzbow - Processed 1
• Tamarin - Untitled 1
• Tamarin - Untitled 2

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12 February 2006

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Albums and Singles

Edward Ka-Spel's appearance on the upbeat and bubbling "Globally Yours" is the cream of the crop as far as this record is concerned. I avoided listening to this record for longest time after reading the puerile lyrics for "Monoball," but after giving it a chance it's now obvious that this release needs memorable tunes more than anything else.

Brocoli

It isn't shocking that a French duo would write a song in the English language and have it fail miserably. The music itself isn't particularly vapid in this case, but when reading lyrics that come across like a teenage nightmare, it's difficult to get caught up in a mood or feeling the music might be trying to convey. I think I might want to dance to this song, but knowing that the lyrics have something to do with having just one ball is... disappointing. The whole song ends up feeling cheap; it would've sounded better without the robotic lyrics, anyways. Yet listening to the opening "Y A-t-il de L'eau Sur Mars?" I get a completely different sense of who this band is and what they do. The quietly pulsing, delicate arrangement of electronic carbonation on this song is exciting, a quick buzz of catchy rhythms and unusual collage. But it's an outright lie because nothing else on Music for Girls sounds anything like it. Only "En Forêt" comes close to reproducing the anxiety of the melodies and rhythms on the opening track. Unsurprisingly, both songs are listed as being based on samples from songs by other people. Minizza work very well when they're given an already interesting set of sounds to work with, but when it comes to doing their own thing, they fail most of the time.

Ka-Spel's presence on "Globally Yours" is enticing, his voice well suited for the rolling percussion and synthetic melodies that litter the song in stabs and gasps. Peter Hook's bass must've been stolen and used for the recording of this song, however, because it's oh so obvious that his particularly stoic manner of playing laid the groundwork for the track's central melody. The rest of the album is an amalgam of styles and French vocal performance, none of which are especially attractive nor catchy. Despite the use of saxophones, flutes, and strings, none of the songs on Music for Girls is exotic or unique. In an attempt to cover a lot of ground stylistically, the band failed to write anything more than two songs worth of melodies worth keeping in the old memory banks. Even the silly and somehow sexually disturbing "Monoball" outclasses most of the second half of the record.

Add the fact that many of these songs don't sound like they even belong on the same album and the end result is a disappointing record that began with a lot of promise. Trying to smash all these massively different songs together on the same album makes much of the music seem lame and forced. The lazy and sensual "Je Suis Mort" is a pretty song, but it sounds like it belongs to the romantic world of France as envisioned by tourists from America during the 60s, not to the shape and sound of the rest of the record. Since none of the songs really sound like they belong together, this sense of discontinuity keeps the record from ever really grabbing hold of me. The exceptions are the three more abstract songs the occupy the beginning and end of the record. The final song on the album, "Juste Avant l'Orage," sounds like a cramped and drug fueled vision of all the most possessive and aggravated aspects of every relationship ever suffocated out of existence by paranoia and violence. As such, it's an impressive and maniacal song that doesn't belong anywhere on an album otherwise filled with failed pop songs and sickeningly sweet imitations of French music from twenty or so years ago.

samples:

• Globally Yours
• Je Suis Mort
• Demon Lover (She's a)

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12 February 2006

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Albums and Singles

The lost and forgotten member of Company Flow is back with a gritty andsearing if slightly uneven clarion call-out. Long playing the Flav toEl-P's Chuck D, Bigg Jus hit an early peak as one-third of industrylegends Co-Flow. But unlike El-P, Jus has yet to make a solo effortworthy of holding a candle to Funcrusher Plus.

Mush

While achieving biblical-status in the canons of underground rap, Funcrusheressentially funded  the rise of backpacker-mecca Rawkus Records.That's hard to follow. Bigg Jus has got the name and the pedigree, butit's high time to get his name back in the spotlight, and Poor People's Day is nothing if not ambitious.

To call it planned would be conspiracy-baiting of the most ludicrousorder, but Jus couldn't have timed the release better: after thedebacle in New Orleans, the plight of the poor and disenfranchised(read: black) is a most relevant topic, on the minds of talking headson TV and would-be revolutionaries on the street. A semi-conceptalbum, all thirteen tracks are "for" the huddled masses—whether it'sJus decrying the military-industrial complex in metaphor or ruminatingon the burdens of being black—and downtrodden in America, cursingthe man and wishing for a better future. The most poignant and searingverses deal with race: "How do I begin this history lesson?/ How do Iteach my seed the government considers him opposition/... If theyconsider him a threat Lord knows they try to kill him/ But he must knowabout Tuskegee syphilis injections and how scientists turn vaccinesinto bioweapons."

DJ Gman's empty-cupboard orchestration iswell-suited for such heavy words. They're sparse and gritty,evoking images of empty streets in an urban wasteland and dark cloudsover the horizon. While he uses a healthy amount of turntablism—alost concept for some producers—he doesn't sample much. When hedoes use samples, they're used as punctuation: a chorus of chanting voices, somewailing strings or something else approrpriately onimous, eerie ordramatic. They don't steal the show by any means but they're notsupposed to, it's Jus's show and he's got something to say.

There's a reason why Juss is the forgotten member of Co-Flow: he's atalented and imaginative street poet, but his mic delivery is averageat best, so he makes up for it with sheer imagination.  Poor People's Dayis full of terrible imagery, of scenes of mayhem and chaos, andpromises of post-apocalyptic chaos. A typical verse sees Jus imagininghimself as an "energy harvester/I sip on molten lava, skin made ofsolar panels/photosynthesis be pumping chlorophyll intravenous throughmy incisors." Such mysterious rhymes paint the picture of Jus not as amegaphone-wielding organizer of the masses, but an empty-eyed dreadeddude, knocking on your door in the middle of the night and splitting,leaving only a note on the porch reading "IT IS TIME."

The complexitymakes Poor People's Day almost impossibly esoteric, andprobably purposefully so. It's a strange irony to have a paean for themasses be so cryptic, and many will be left scratching their heads, buta lucky few will get to enjoy a hyper-political, abstract gem.

samples:

• Orbital Mechanics
• Illustrations of Heironymous Bosch
• Anything You See Fit

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08 February 2006

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Albums and Singles

The third single off Thrills,Allien’s most recent full length is actually one of my least favoritetracks from a record that has taken some time to get used to.  After Berlinette,the artist’s blissful attempt at incorporating glitch and pop elements into herunique blend of sleek post-electro and handmade futurist techno, Thrills seemed a rather straightforwardattempt at bringing her art back to the dancefloor: it's certainly addictive butfor many a sideways step. 

Bpitch Control

While Berlinette was subtly flavored withreferences to tired, classic trance, techno, and industrial tracks, Thrills seemed at first to lack thetransformative effect that such borrowings underwent on the previousrecord.  Subsequent listens taught me toview the record as an experimentation session whose frequent over-stylizations becamethe frills of an attempt to meld the monolithic and minimal sounds of herinfluences with the Bpitch aesthetic embracing rough-edges, the supercool ofGerman techno, and a sense of scatterbrained, urban fusion. 

Though it does have some nice processed vocalnoises, “Down” is just too much of the button-pushing, brow-beating minimalelectro for my taste.  The vocal refrain,“Break Me Down,” is likewise not complex enough to carry any weight.  Of the three remixes on this 12”, the first,from Dinky, a female Chilean DJ is the most successful, stretching the trackinto a nine-minute cool, pulsing atmospheric, politely avoiding the deadeningthree-note, time-keeping phrase of the original as much as possible, or insteadharmonizing it to make the effect less stunted. To the slowed beat, Dinky adds a muted plucked guitar or piano, giving“Down” a needed coastal air that all but completely obscures its original’smood.  Italians Drama Society’s mix turns“Down” archetypal cold, chiming electro slow-burner, way too unchanging andpredictable to excite me, until, for about the last minute, when they chop inthe “ahh-ahh” vocal, louder and more stretchy than the original, sounding reallynice.  French hip-hop producers FuckAloopbasically recreate the entire track, using mostly a slowed version of thestuttered industrial shuffle of the rhythm track as template, layed over withsome flashy, fried synth noodling and a re-created vocoder version of the vocalwhich, predictably, sounds annoying.  Ifthey’d incorporated some faster breaks into the monotonous static rhythm, thistrack may have come out sounding alright, but the goofy synths do not jive wellwith anything, Ellen Allien or not.  Honestly,I’m a bit surprised Ellen endorsed these last two mixes, after some good oneson her last two singles.

samples:

• Dinky's Break Me Down remix
• Drama Society remix
• FuckALoop remix
  

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08 February 2006

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Albums and Singles

Landing's latest full length album is more of a single symphony than fiveseparate tracks; Brocade is not a song-based album but one longcontinuous work. The music unwinds at a leisurely pace and is bestappreciated all in one sitting.


Strange Attractors

Brocade is largely instrumental (only "How to be Clean" has anyvocals) and is bathed in analog synthesizers with lots of guitareffects. There's an unmistakable '70s prog rock sound going on and thepure synths on "Music for ThreeSynthesizers" are very '80s sounding to me, but Landing keeps it modernandfresh, without playing like they're simply digging up old rockcorpses. The music is hypnotic, repetitive, and layered, but by nomeans dull or heavy.


Despite the building layers it has a very open andspacious feel, a feel which is reinforced by titles like "Loft" and"Yon," bringing up images of empty skies and vast distances (echoed aswell in the rather barren landscape on the album's cover)."Spiral Arms" is similarly well-named; if you could put a galaxyinto sound, it might just sound like this. The static buzz carried overfrom "Yon" gives way to delicate acoustic guitar and electronic swoopsand blowing winds. "How to be Clean" is a rocker and addsenough movement and energy to the mix to keep this guitar-rock girlhappy.

I found it difficult to listen to Brocade at work; inaddition to the usual cube farm noise and coworker interruptions,Winamp's pauses between tracks made the transitions jarring, mostnotably between "Yon" and "Spiral Arms" and between "Spiral Arms" and"How to be Clean." This is one to listen to at home with a glass ofwine in a darkened room or on a long lonely car trip, and it'scertainly not one for the iPod Shuffle.

• Loft
• Spiral Arms
• How to be Clean

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07 February 2006

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Albums and Singles

Prefuse 73 follows up his last, guest-filled full length with thisstripped-back instrumental "mini album" dedicated to the rigors oftraveling to promote and perform his music. This is cut up hip hop forthe short attention span set, and should satisfy the folks who criedfoul when he littered his last hip hop record with (gasp) rapping!

Warp


Prefuse 73 is on the leading edge of a new waveof hip hop that's not strictly aiming for commercial success, but isn'tso intentionally obtuse as to escape it either. Scott Herren's productionchops and approach to songwriting make him a prime candidate to besucked into the major, hit-oriented world as a weirder version of theNeptunes, but luckily he's still working on stuff that isn'ttaylor-made for the likes of Nelly and Snoop Dogg to spit over. If hislast record frustrated a lot of folks who preferred his more abstract,instrumental work to his MC-fueled hip hop proper, this record could bethe antidote, or at least a stop gap until the next one.

Herren's career is one that's strangely straddling differentcamps of fans. The indie hip hop crowd has obviously accepted him, butit's okay to like Prefuse in strictly knob-obsessed laptop tweakercircles too, and it seems everyone wants to claim him. But when Ilisten to Security Screenings, I only hear it as a hip hoprecord, something directly related to similar outings from Cut Chemist,DJ Krush, or even DJ Shadow. While Herren's methods for attacking hissound sources are a bit more obvious about their digital constructionthan his DJ peers', he shares a spirit with producers who arrangesampled records a bit more organically. The quick edits and needledrops on obscure records with odd voice-overs are required fare inheady hip hop, and the in-jokes and interludes that tie songs on thealbum together are nearly as essential to the format as turntables andmicrophones.

All of this is probably what makes Prefuse 73's work sosuccessful. It feels genuine and fits squarely in the hip hop aestheticwhile still being adventurous in a scene plagued by stagnation. Itdoesn't ever feel like Herren is just borrowing hip hop cues and lingoto mash up into a post-modern digital soup, rather he's making hip hopin a new way, using some new tricks, but relying mostly on old ones.With all the talk of digital this and Warp records that and with Herrenplaying alongside big names in the techno world, I was expectingsomething a little less rooted and more exploitative. Plenty of peopleare taking and abusing hip hop motifs and throwing them into othergenres for flavor, but Herren seems bent on just making simple hip hoprecords. This is exactly what caused me to wonder why this was such abig deal four years ago, and exactly why I get it now and think thatmaybe Prefuse 73 is just the victim of confused expectations sometimes.

Security Screenings is, in a way, a hold over recorduntil the next full length, and as such, it feels a little b-sideysometimes. Still, it's hard to hold a grudge against tunes like"Matrimonioids" or "Creating Cyclical Headaches," which features Herrenalongside Four Tet, when they so wonderfully combine fuzzy, organicmelodies with taught beat loops. A new full length LP will be out soonenough, but for now, Security Screenings is a nice look intothe process of making hip hop with a new generation of tools. Majorlabels are no doubt listening and co-opting this sound as we speak.

 

samples:

• Creating Cyclical Headaches (feat. Four Tet)
• No Origin
• Matrimonioids

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07 February 2006

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Albums and Singles

Neil Campbell’s sixth volume of his solo efforts away from Vibracathedral Orchestra’s more democratic accommodating approach is an outstanding collection of different musical pieces. Volume 6 is probably the best yet, running the musical gamut between experimental, melody, drone and fun. The only way I can think to recommend this series anymore would be for me to go around selling it door to door.

self-released

I expected some drones, I expected a bit of feedback and I even thought there might be a barrage of noise. I didn’t expect "Untitled 3" to offer up heaven spilling otherworldly outpost noise and an elongated ‘lone piper on hilltop’ melody rising from a cloud of urban fumes. The rest of this CD-R is equally arresting and combines handheld percussion with sleepy lasers ("Untitled 5"), freeze frame songs of praise ("Untitled 5"), and squirreling wah-wah piece with eight or so different elements competing for my attention ("Untitled 4").

He starts proceedings with a rough and scuffed frantic rhythm with an underlying bleepage 33rpm record played three times as fast. But beneath this cranked murmur is a softer undercarriage of sound that ripples relaxingly. Membership of the Astral Social Club has also made me accept some artist’s propensity to cut their work short in mid zone-out. The sudden edits peppered throughout this release seem to make sense here. These cuts seem more like parts of the song rather than editing or space decisions. "Untitled 8" goes the other way and fades up in a back to front fashion seemingly full of organic crackles and steaming whooshes sounding very much like a passing party craft of some sort.

Closing the release in an unexpected—but very enjoyable—way is a live blow-out feedback drone-punk version of The Temptations "Get Ready". The guitar line that’s blasted here on an endless repeat is trapped within a chunk of flinted amber while a good time wallow in noise swirls around it. This meeting creates a kind of motionless funk as parts of the mix are lifted, through accident or design, in and out of the aural light making this ‘almost’ cover ripe for a nasty DJ set.

 

 

• Untitled 3
• Untitled 8
• Untitled 10

 

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06 February 2006

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Albums and Singles

Very little on this eleven track remix project moves me to endorse it. The prospect of Gruntsplatter and Troum remixing Aidan Baker's varied catalogue is exciting, but many of these revisions add up to little more than frivolous games played with choice sampling material.

Arcolepsy
 
I figured that Baker's varied output would provide opportunity for each of these remixers to reconstruct his songs altogether and come up with something new and exciting. It'd be easy, I thought, to add all kinds of new material to his songs while retaining some elements of the originals. "Baker's musical palette is practically begging for reconstruction," I said, but evidently few people are sure of what to do with his music. According to the notes that come in this handmade package, each of the remixers used entire albums as sources for the music. Be that as it may, many of these songs are so boringly flat and dull that I can't imagine any one of them using more than just a few minutes of one song on each album. Both "Cloning (1 Blood Made 2 Remix)" and "Interweaver (Jazzy Mix)" attempt to add new beats to Baker's music, using his guitar drones and other electronic blurs to make music that adds up to nothing new or exciting at all. It's as though the remixers felt they could cover up their own lack of inspiration by disguising Baker's music as something deserving of washed up drum beats and club treatment. The Orb did this ten years ago, but I was excited about their albums. This is chill out music, something to ignore while doing the laundry or reading a book.

In some cases the remixers attempted to expand on themes that Baker had established in the source material. Building Castles Out of Matchsticks remixed music from Cicatrice, an album built around a theme of "mechanical/insectoid" guitar work. The drum breaks that the group added to the song certainly bring out a fluttering, nightmarish quality reminiscent of giant robot insects flying about, but there's just not enough flare and excitement in the music to make it stand out. It sounds, more or less, like a textbook example of how to make fast, inhuman beats fit in with any kind of music whatsoever. It sounds as though everyone must've thrown their hands up in the air in frustration because they weren't quite sure how to mold something interesting and musical out of music that is inherently shapeless, or at least constantly changing. In most cases it seems as though everyone said to themselves, "throw in some beats, that'll solve the problem!" Gruntsplatter and the Blameshifter both prove it is possible to play with Baker's music and leave the percussion at home.

Both used multiple sources as sound material for their remixes and both try to confront Baker's music without turning it into an electronic dance session. Their remixes are dense, layered songs breaking and popping with melodies, bending with inconsistencies, and constantly evolving. In other words, the good remixes on this disc don't mess with Baker's style so much as they attempt to shape it in new ways. Gruntsplatter's remix is especially involving, using five sources and mixing them expertly into a wave of sound pictures that slowly fall apart and fade away into a buzzing pulse that consumes the end of the track. It sounds more like a song unto itself than any of the other remixes on the disc because it is so imaginative and varied, not because it added some beats or rearranged a few sounds here and there so as to make a melody that didn't exist on the original album. When Gruntsplatter meshes two different pieces of sound together it is a convincing marriage that doesn't violate Baker's compositional style. Troum's remix, though using only one source, succeeds because it doesn't try to re-imagine the music entirely, placing it in a strange setting it could never belong in. Troum seem to let the original guide them on a new path, but they don't attempt to punch holes in the music and turn the whole affair into something it was never meant to be. They took caution and didn't attempt to relocate Baker's music altogether, they simply allowed it to move and play in new ways. It is no easy task remixing a drone-based work, but they do it and they do it well.

Despite the spattering of bad remixes on this CD, the three or four good tracks on here are stunningly good and represent what the possibilities of a remix still hold. The best material on the disc reshapes Baker's music and places it in a new setting, but without going overboard. The addition of beats and melodies doesn't make for a satisfying remix of Baker's music. It takes a little more imagination than that and the ability to play with sound as living thing and not just some source to add beats beneath. Beyond that, it takes the ability to imagine something new in something to inherently bare and it shows on this disc that such a task is much harder than it might seem. Of the eleven artists on this disc, only four passed the test with any degree of success.

samples:

• Millimetrik - "Interweaver (Jazzy Mix)"
• Cordell Klier - "I've Been Waiting for You"
• Gruntsplatter - "Predatory Sediment"

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