Moanerman

Name: Ray Van Mechelen
Home Page: http://myspace.com/cocabots
Member Since: May 17, 2004
Rank: 333
Average Vote Received: Correct (3.80, 10 votes)
Rated 4308 releases, average: 4.21
Location: Earth, Belgium
Profile: Born in 1980, dj, collector and a difficult person.

Interests: electronic music, reading, the 80's, David Lynch, space-art and women, duh!

I also have a second wantlist for italo-disco right here: Italo-Moaner

Preferences: Blonde or brunette, it doesn`t matter, as long as they look good. But also: Ambient, Acid, Italo Disco, Experimental, Techno, Electro, Old synth sounds like the Juno, Moog, Jupiter etc...

You can download my weekly ambientbroadcasts from Intergalactic FM 3 right here: Ray Van Mechelen

Seller Rating:

100.0% positive (28 ratings)

Buyer Rating: 100.0% positive (423 ratings)

Moanerman's groups (8)

Reviews:

Trax-X - Molecule 66 - 14-Nov-09 06:35 AM
I've never understood all the fuzz about the track Gravity on this EP. It's a typical rave anthem that sounds very dated nowadays. The reason why you should purchase this record is because of the track Analogique. This is pure acid madness: fast, fucked up, brainy and grungy as hell, the 303 sounds like blubber that comes right of the gutter, a nasty fucker as we speak. If you like the 303 sounds of Beverly Hills 808303 you will certainly like Analogique, no doubt about that.

Leo Anibaldi - Muta - 13-Nov-09 07:46 AM
An absolutely stunning album by Leo Anibaldi. Muta seems to be divided in two parts: the first record consists of listening music, the second record is stuff for the floor.

The album is worth owning for the first record alone. All tracks on this first record are in the well known Anibaldi-style: top productions, versatile moods, unique sounds and melodies. The second track on the A-side is a breathtaking dark ambient beast, with it’s more than 10 minutes duration it captures you from the first to the final note. There’s not a single piece of hope in this track, it creates an image of how the world would look like after the apocalypse: very moody, desolate and extremely dark. This must be one the deepest pieces of ambient I’ve ever heard. This is one of these things only a handful artists are able to do: making music that is very perturbing and gripping, you just can’t listen to this in the background, it will claim your attention immediately.

We get a totally other image on the B-side, especially the second track which is more like a real “song” than a soundscape. A very subtle and beautiful melody with a calm and unhurried bassline. This song is not dark at all but Anibaldi manages to create a very wistful and melancholic mood. An absolutely astonishing piece of electronic music.

The for-the-floor tracks are well worth mentioning too. The first track on the C-side for example is nothing more than the rework of the dark ambient track on the A-side but this time it’s faster and it contains beats, very simple but effective. The other tracks are all in the typical acidic Anibaldi-style: brainy and holocaustic floor stompers.

Leo Anibaldi was 21 years old when he made this album which is nearly unbelievable. It proves once again that he is one of the most talented and brilliant artists ever. An absolutely genius album…

Alec Empire - Low On Ice (The Iceland Sessions) - 10-Nov-09 11:45 AM
This must be one of the most unique pieces of electronic music that I have in my collection. It’s the type of music where you can’t put any label on. I’ve heard a lot of music in my life and as an ambient adept I’ve experienced lots of music that crosses all boundaries of the musical spectrum but this album is really something special, to say the least. The title fits perfectly with the music as this is cold, very cold. It’s really astonishing that it creates such a unique and overwhelming atmosphere with such a little amount of sounds. Most of the tracks have beats, very slow beats that are woven into wonderful and strange soundscapes that sound like ice sculptures.

Another aspect of this album is that most of the tracks have a lot of reverb and are extremely lo-fi. This combination sucks you into a spiral of ice cold shivers and indefinable places. If you play this album on the right time, at the right place and last but not least: on a good sound system (so you can play the low-fi beats properly) this music works like heroin. Totally mesmerizing and unique in every possible way. Alec Empire created a masterpiece here, and it’s not his only one…

Wicked Messenger - Vision Rites And Techniques Of Ecstasy - 01-Nov-09 02:10 PM
This is one of these albums that really needed to grow on me. I thought it was "good" the first time I heard it but after listening to it more and more I realized that this is a true masterpiece. Yes, it's in the same vein of the rest of the Plague catalogue, which means dark ambience and drones but yet it is different. This is something Plague Recordings keeps succeeding in every time: releasing dark ambient but always from a new and unique angle.

To me, 'Vision Rites And Techniques Of Ecstasy' is an ancient story about cult and rituals, very mysterious and dark rituals. The atmosphere feels very desolate. While listening to this you think about ruins, the ancient Maya cult but you never get a bright or clear image of it, everything is woven into that dusty, vague and mysterious atmosphere.

The track "Ritual Trance" is the point where that atmosphere captures me the most. That whispering-like sound feels very ethereal but also very desolate and far away in the time spectrum. It's hard to explain what it evokes. It reminds me of the sound and vibe that you hear in Deathprod's "Dead People's Things" from the album 'Morals And Dogma'.

'Vision Rites And Techniques Of Ecstacy' is definitely Wicked Messenger's most intense and best work to date. It needs it’s time to tell it's story but once it captures you, there is no way back. An absolutely stunning ambient masterpiece.

Starfish Pool - 24-Jun-09 02:27 AM
Starfish Pool’s music was the sound of my puberty, I can’t say it in a better way. As a 14 years old kid I had a really hard time at home: struggle between my parents, searching for an own identity, bored at school, questioning myself, exploring the sense of life etc. Starfish Pool’s music was the soundtrack for that period in my life. PS: everything ended up well with me :-)

I still remember the moment I discovered his album Amplified Tones at the local music store. No one was interested in this ‘weird’ music. I instantly fell in love with this obscure and lo-fi sounding album although I had never heard of Starfish Pool, I even didn’t now that he was from my own country, Belgium. I discovered a lot of other music by him thanks to my niece’s boyfriend, who was a DJ at the time. I didn’t have a turntable so he put EP 1, 2 and 3 on tape for me, just to name a few. I recorded all his music on a couple of tapes and I was listening to it constantly in my walkman.

This was a whole new and safe world to me: Starfish Pool’s music is quite unique. Very minimalistic, moody, dark and somehow out of this world. This fitted perfectly with my mood. During the years I collected nearly everything produced by this man, and also the stuff by other artists on his labels. What I concluded is that he is capable of producing a lot of ‘genres’. His discography is very versatile: techno, experimental, noise, ambient or electro but always with that minimalistic, hypnotic, and devasting approach. I played a lot of his cd’s to death so I just bought them all again. Insane? No: love.

Koen Lybaert still produces music nowadays under his Ontayso disguise, now more dub-orientated and with ambient influences (certainly on the same quality level of Rod Modell) . Totally different from his earlier work but still with high quality standards. The 24 hours box for example is a masterpiece of chilled, dubbed-out and fragile landscapes. Koen Lybaert will always be a great musical influence to me and I treasure his (now dirt cheap) EP’s and albums as much as my hard-to-find and expensive gems, that’s the least I can say.

A lot of my friends are obsessed with dark and minimal techno but when I tell them about Starfish Pool they say they never heard of him. That’s somehow a typical example of the Belgian attitude: they admire people like Hood, Mills, Ruskin, Surgeon etc (no offence, I like their music too) but they never pay attention to their own backyard. There are a lot of unknown gems to discover on the many early nineties labels from Belgium. Valium, Brain Pilot, Xingu Hill, to name a few artists from those labels like Nova Zembla and KK. Don’t look too far, the gems are just in front of you…

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