DJ Moves | Pam Grier’s Kids | Big Moves
DJ Moves is from Nova Scotia and has some deft technique. Pam Grier’s Kids showcases it tenfold — featuring a plethora of rappers; blending and traversing through his high-art, cuts, and beats. DJ Moves goes blunt on tracks like “The III Formula,” featuring Cee!!!!!!!, and “Thunder Warriors,” featuring Kush, where hardness is paramount and transparency is crystal whereas “StankinSpeckledSocks,” featuring Jeff Spec, Ghettosocks & Stinkin Rich, deforms that hardness and breaks it up, allowing the lyricists to perform like water and dreams, a beautiful pace with cubist-like incantation. On space adjusters like “Morris Day,” featuring Tachichi, it’s the punctuation, extension and touch that defines the form — a combination that is pure hip-hop. DJ Moves has the ability to darken and lighten the movement within songs, often paralleling multiple times throughout a track; this creates a concentration that is at the forefront, allowing the lyrics to glow and infuse within the listener.
Tomb Mold | Aperture of Body | Self-released
Tomb Mold’s got a new three-song EP out that defines and refines their death metal aura, this time using space as trajectory, treating it to highlight movements rather than the effects. For three songs, you get quite the treatment. From tactile horizons (“Final Assembly of Light”), to classic rippers (“Aperture of Body”), to the Chuck Schuldiner-inspired ending in “Prestige of Rebirth,” this is a trip that is concise and open, presenting itself as clear and driven, something Tomb Mold has always done well: they never trip over themselves, their interest in varying forms of sound and melody always keeps them sounding alive, right there in your central line of vision; they pack the periphery with taste, contemporary art, and continue to work on the main structure, and it shows on Aperture of Body: three songs that never leave you wanting more: there’s plenty enough right here, plenty enough for a long and real experience.
Платтенбау (Plattenbau) | (=2021) | Cruel Nature Records
Aleksandr Chlesa’s solo project, Платтенбау (Plattenbau), is a heady dive into acid techno and inventive beats. The compositions have a knack for bending the space-time continuum: one minute you’re here, the next minute you’re not. It’s the continuous nature of the groove and feel that causes such flights of the mind. And those flights might seem numb almost; you’ll get lost completely, like a brick, and it’s good because this is techno that has depth and variation, but it’s subtle, and you might miss it conceptually; it still retains that blinding techno quality to it where you become something outside of yourself, like at the club, a long time ago, grooving, forgotten, cosmopolitan, an out-of-body experience. The songs really build on top of one another. By the time the dark-laden “Step 5” hits (the six songs are entitled “Step 1,” “Step 2,” through “Step 6”), you’re in the true mind of Платтенбау, not really any place in particular, but all places, all together and it feels good.
Predatory Light | Death and the Twilight Hours | 20 Buck Spin
For songs that often drift past the 10-minute mark, Predatory Light are masters of making every moment feel eternal. The twin guitars connect and reconnect sections seamlessly, creating worlds within worlds; you get swept up in the strange darkness, the bleak and unique mood that the band weaves through form and momentum. There’s a spiritual quality to the four songs on the record that are true; like the early Norwegian black metal bands; Predatory Light showcases propulsion that is organic and fresh. Death and the Twilight Hours is psychedelic and eerie — a haunting, European quality plays throughout, a sinister pitch that is consuming and direct. Back to the length of the compositions: few bands can pull this off, and even fewer black metal bands, but Predatory Light are really good and never waste your time: it’s full force, full art, straight on, worthy practitioners of a true black metal.
