This album is mindblowing. It is, and always will be, one of my favorite ambient albums of all time. And it is also, in my opinion, one of the most flatout scariest records I know. The first time I heard this one at a record store I said to myself "heh, this sounds nice", but this album takes all its meaning when played in the dark, in the middle of the night, the spare sound of cicadas mumbling outside the opened windows.

When you listen to this one in the dark, it will reveal its true space, the sudden bursts of animal cries will send shivers through your veins and the background noises will sound like distant strange signals from another world. On this regard the title, Still Valley, but also the artwork is really appropriate here, as the entire piece just yells this description, a village lost in the middle of a green valley, where nothing moves, time is just frozen, and you are wandering around wondering why everything is so silent, why the water doesn't move down the river, why the birds are suspended in mid air, why every life seemed to have been sucked out of everything that surrounds you.

This is a perfect soundtrack for a nightmare, but not a lousy, noisy nightmare, no, more of the kind of those silent ones you make, where you are lost and nothing will save you from the void. This is not one of those ambient records you sleep at, but rather one that scares the hell out of you by being so strangely quiet.

A truly timeless, incredible piece of music, the kind you have to experience more than to actually listen to.

I recently came across this one in a record store, and I was curious to hear what those remixes sounded like...

The 'Feelgood Mix' is, I guess, more like the "original mix" of the three. It's a quality remix, with cool building and sounds, and creepy voice effects. Standard stuff, but hooks you up with it's great bassline and the hollow voice at the end. It's also the remix that comes the closest to the final album version on Earthling (most notably the pattern of hi-pitched synth notes, the only actual element besides the voice to be featured on the album mix).

The 'Paradox Mix', by A Guy Called Gerald, is all based on one thing : ambience. Spooky reverberated guitar signals, lo-pitched growls, and an incredible rhythm. The voice is a little buried under the mix in this one, but it's used more as an instrument than for it's actual meaning. The 'detuned' pad is awesome, it really fits the spooky, freaky feeling of the whole thing. A great remix, with perfect build-up and sounds...

But the 'Adam F Mix', that concludes the single, is the one to go for. It's really the most melodic one of the whole, and unfortunately it's also the shortest. When I listen to this one I can't help but feel it has been edited somehow, which is a shame, but doesn't alter the quality of it. The melody and layers used in it don't sound very 'out of this world', but they are so well put together that you just forget about it and get sucked into the mix. Just for this one alone the cd is worth buying, mindblowing stuff.

Here is Volume 5 in the Warehouse Sessions series by Claro Intelecto, an awesome series I might add. And what could be better to end a series than actually ending it with one of, if not THE best track of the whole ?

"Momento" is a piece of fine dubby detroit styled techno, classic Claro Intelecto style, with an obsessing, almost off-beat melodic pattern, arpegiated chords, which always go upwards but ultimately just stay in place, in a kind of hypnotic spiral of sharp hihats and metallic sounds...

But the track to go for has to be "Hunt You Down". The track itself has a pretty self-explanatory architectural construction, built on layers of ungoing beat patterns, along with some humming and growling metallic sheets of backwards textured noises. But the simplicity just enhances the track's power : the build up is like a Maurizio 'M' track, going on and on, driving on an endless road, to a climax that will just never happen. The track is a hunt, the chords are behind you, ready to catch you if you stop running for a second, but they will never manage to. And the chase goes on, in a blend of awesome sound textures, and will eventually let you here all sweaty, after ten minutes of pure quality dub techno. The scientific precision applied to the drum programming and the delays timing is just insanely perfect that it drives me mad just listening to it.

A record you must own. Just for the sake of having "Hunt You Down" on vinyl, it's worth the price you put in it.

2009 : Raster-Noton year ? After the release of the sublime Liedgut by Uwe Schmidt (aka ATOM Tm), Carsten Nicolai and his wonderful abstract drones on Xerrox Vol. 2 and a beautiful book containing Wolfgang Voigt's Gas artwork projects, here comes another great, surprising and fresh piece of minimalism from Snd...

16 anonymous tracks blending classic techno drum parts with short musical informations that come in the form of tiny fragments of chords and reduced minimalstic organ notes, often based on the same scales, which create a minimal landscape full of small rhythm structures, simple but effective. Some breakbeat elements also come along, sometimes polyrhythms, emerge from the sound material that Mark Fell and Mat Steel use in this album.

Here they play with techno elements to create a new glitchy language made of catchy patterns, but at the same time dealing with experimental (think Ryoji Ikeda but less focused on extreme frequencies). The album doesn't really revolves around a defined structure but rather plays with the listener's senses in surprising him with sounds emerging from nowhere, sometimes linking tracks together to form a giant minimal sound building.

Quality experimentation. Strongly recommended.

His real name is Serge Collin. He comes from Montreal. And he is, alongside Rod Modell, the best dub techno artist since Basic Channel left the style they created to drift on Reggae territory.

His releases combines dub techno in it's purest form (delayed crispy synths with pumping kicks, swirling basslines and a slice of metallic claps and synthetic hihats on top) with amazing dronish ambient soundscapes (sometimes coupled with catchy beats) that just are SUPERB.

And by superb I mean you HAVE to take a listen to those tracks because, in my opinion, that's where he really kicks ass. Not that the dub techno tracks aren't good, don't get me wrong, they are absolutely awesome, but his soundscapes are just mindblowingly good, close to Gas for the atmospheres and Thomas Köner for the drones.

I look forward to see an ambient album from him which will hopefully come soon.

An artist not to miss. His records are great, and they will sure be recognized as true classics as the time goes by.

Dub techno is, at the moment I'm writing this review, one of the most hyped electronic music genres, along with dubstep. It seems like people have gradually accustomed to those long, deep and spacey tracks without much melodic progression in them but which undoubtedly makes your foot tapping and your head nodding to the groove, while having a great work on filters and delays.

7027 is, in my opinion, a new nickname of the band or guy previously known as Ovatow. Why ? Take "X-Dub" and "The Pace". Both records share uncanny similarities that could hardly be coincidences : both records share the same font and some kind of minimalistic label design and especially, they both contain that very specific sort of flanged white noise/hihat sound which is very, very recognizable... And they both use very close-sounding synths.

As for the record, it's equally great as X-Dub, but I personally think it's even better : both of the sides are somewhat similar but they have a surrealistic appeal and a great ambience, making a classic-but-superb use of dubby synth lines and pseudo-cassette background noise, all packed with a pumping kick drum just perfect for dancefloor use, at 8 o'clock in the morning, just to be nasty and wake up everybody. And as for the visual part, the vinyl is a semi-transparent brownish-marbled piece of plastic, but it looks just fantastic on a turntable.

A record not to miss.

Quite simply one of the best techno labels around here.

Perfect blend between the sounds of Downwards Records and Chain Reaction, following the tradition of anonimity in techno music (no website, no email address) this structure hasn't released a single weak release since it's beginning.

From great quality pounding industrial-techno tracks (Female, Regis/Ian J. Richardson...) to underground style superbly produced crispy techno (Silent Servant, CH Signal Laboratories, Kalon...) and bleepy detroit techno hybrid that could have resulted from a collaboration between Sleeparchive and Jeff Mills (the mighty Function releases, just pure awesomeness).

Hope it'll continue that way, but for me, it is already a great imprint. Must-have stuff !

Spaces is a study on relaxation. It is the own Fluxion's concept of ambient pushed to its boundaries. Each track is structured like an environment, and is the sonic equivalent of it's own name : with a subtle, intelligent use of reverbs and echoes, Konstantinos Soublis makes you feel like you're actually in the real place the track describes...

Field I is a concrete example of how you can hear sounds echoed in a field, Corridor reproduces the shape of an actual endless corridor, where you hear the sounds bouncing against the walls. The whole album is somehow based on this idea. In Coast you can almost hear the sound of waves silently crashing against the cliffs, only lacking the cries of gulls. Unechoic Room immediately makes me think of some kind of strange machinery trapped in a narrow room.

But the best track of the album is definitely Field II : this track, you can only experience it with good headphones, lied on a sofa, the head resting on a soft pillow, hearing the sounds floating above you, and almost expect to open your eyes and find yourself in a real field, in the middle of the night.

An essential purchase.

Could this record be the new Basic Channel release ?

It's highly doubtful, but if you look closer, it's not that impossible : they didn't released anything since See Mi Yah, they love pseudonyms, and it comes directly from the Hard Wax store. But hey, the tracks on this 12" are awesome, and they could very well bear the Basic Channel trademark, with this crafty, crispy machine sound that instantanely makes you wanna dance.

And this is a sign that musn't be ignored...

This is one of my all-time favorite albums. With this 14-tracks CD, Tetsuo Tsuri manages to blow up my mind into tiny pieces each time I listen to this. The album has a grainy sound with lots of clicks, almost like an old vinyl record. But here, that's what makes the whole beauty of it. "Milieux" is an ambiant, Vladislav Delay style track, with a click & buzz rhythmic specific of Chain Reaction releases, which resembles "Oshikicho #controlled", another great Matrix track. The "Red Films" and "Blue Films" are overall quite short tracks (except Blue Films #5 and #2) but they always manage to catch your mind to bring it to foreign landscapes. "Zkj", "Flora" and "See Off" are superb beat-driven grainy tracks with lots of space and delays. "Nimbus" makes you listen to the heartbeat of a giant machine. "Isolated Dot" is a moody 4/4 beat track with tons of harmonics. And at the end is "Isthmus #fast", a long and beautiful track, very close to Shinichi Atobe's "The Red Line" (on the same label) which has the same kind of atmosphere : melancholic and timeless. Groundbreaking...