Audion ‎– Suckfish

Respectfully I must say this is the lousiest thing I have heard in the past year. Bleepy bloppy minimal that has no direction, atmosphere, or soul, and drags on ad infinitum without acheiving anything. Production talent is absent in all but a few of the tracks on here, most take advantage of a few skilled loops and use that for the basis of the entire composition. Some minimal is great, but this release epitomizes everything I abhor in a genre that, when done wrong, can turn out to be the most pointless and boring genre of edm.

I seem to fall into the typical Matthew Dear fan category - I loved "Leave Luck to Heaven," but I'm not a huge fan of his vocals and I've enjoyed his subsequent releases less and less. Thankfully he still does straight-up minimal techno as both Audion and False.

The music features some very carefully selected sounds that help maintain interest. The worst thing one could say about a minimal techno recording is that it is boring - certainly not the case here. While it's minimal, there is always something going on, however slight. It's not nearly as austere as some of Plastikman's work - there are even occasional melodies.

Aside from the compositional strength, the production is great. The beats are perfectly crisp filled with tiny sounds that seem to leap from the speakers like pin pricks. They're balanced nicely with deep bass leaving a lot of room in the middle of the mix for some reverb-drenched ambience, thus giving the music some real character.

The main reason that I'm giving this album four stars instead of five is that while it's very solid, I'm not yet sure it's an absolute classic. As good as Matthew Dear is these days, I think he's going to continue to mature and his work will just get better and better.

Some of the tracks are a bit weak, to my ears anyway. I've been a fan of minimal techno for a long time and I have a number of characteristics that I look for. For instance, if you're going to ask the listener to stay invested in a ten-minute piece that features only the slightest of perceptible change, the sounds that *are* there must be perfect. I'm wary of this style of music because it would be easy for a composer to crank out a lot of brainless repetition. Fortunately, that hasn't happened yet, but it's a danger. From that position, I become annoyed if I sense a piece is basically on autopilot. I'm not suggesting that Audion's music is boring, overly repetitive, or on "autopilot" - it's very strong, for the most part. Simply put, there are tracks that I tend to skip for lack of interest.

All this is making me sound a lot more critical of the album than I actually am. Although it doesn't reveal its secrets easily, repeat listenings are handsomely repaid. It's the sort of album you can listen to again and again, each time finding new details that are slow to emerge. I highly recommend this to fans of the style. For those new to techno, I would direct you to something more easily accessible. Perhaps Dear's own "Leave Luck to Heaven."

Matthew Dear abandons the more intimate techno under his own name for something much more visceral with his Audion guise. _Suckfish_, his debut album, hits you right where it should. And even if the opening track, "Vegetables," doesn't give you a good pounding, the bare thump of "Your Place or Mine" gets your started so that when the tichy rhyhtms of "T*tty F*ck" kick in, you're roaring to go. "T. B." goes a little deeper and has a sensuous spoken work part, while "Kisses" tilts towards wild waveforms. The spare funk of "Rubber" lets you relax a bit before the throb of "The Pong" comes in. This is pure body techno, enjoyable both on the dancefloor and just in your living room.

This fish doesn't suck; it just takes a bit of getting used to. Hearing this stuff, I see demented, psychedelic, flashing, illusory strobe-lights rhythmically blinking to bleeping, acidic, funky, "sawtooth" techno as though the entire joint's trippin' on a sweaty, psychosomatic episode. This growling animal makes you wanna wear your dancing robot-suits, put on your laser-taser space-age goggles ('pop-specs' anybody?), and jig your sweaty ass. It's absolutely fabulous; the deluxe Lacroix of music. Suck it hard, and see colours! Wuuuuwaaaaaaaaaooooooooowwwwww.