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Manchester Music Online Catch of the Day 2 Review
CATCH OF THE DAY * recommended *
:: Various Artists ::
02 April 2007 / Kipper Records / 8 Trk CD
By JA
I’ll just start off by getting out my system how wonderful
the packaging on this CD is. It’s a CDR, lovingly embossed
with original artwork on the CD's onbody printing. There’s
an inner printed, hand assembled, colour card sleeve, individually
numbered. This goes into another rustic, corrugated card sleeve
with more artwork and it all comes in its own brown paper
bag complete with logo. It all harks back to the original
days of limited edition 7” Vinyl releases. Little packets
of music you had to care for and pay attention to. It’s
in a wild contrast to other demos we get here, assembled by
redundant dockers with overused , blunted magic markers and
second hand plastic wallets.
Anyhow, musically there’s plenty to match this splendid
approach to releasing records.
Scott Bruzenack (California USA) opens proceedings with some
hazy, poppy drawls, graced with flutes and the slap of double
bass and drum snares. It blows like an Americana folk wind
into Staffordshire’s Mundane Music who provide an instrumental
formed around pianos, echoes, bells and the jingle of percussion
on the computer edited crossover “A Train For You”.
The Deep Element (Malmo, Sweden) sensibly continue with similar
themes but delve deeper into the world of electronica. It’s
a disjointed journey, randomly cut and pasted into the gaps
between beats like a beautiful picture broken into smaller,
sharp edged pieces. The Gray, with “Sleep Facing East”,
conjure up Eastern and classical flavours from their Cheshire
home base, mixing meditation tape ideology with the fantastically
wide electronic ambitions of a more ethereal M83. Parisian
DJ Wise makes his contribution “Shake The Dust”
sound like something between a Terminator soundtrack, the
bins being emptied and hip hop tracks being loudly played
in the flat next door.
It’s left to Dupe with “Silkworkers” to
drum up some Brighton Beach sounds. Actually it sounds more
like a sun rise as the looped acoustic shuffle ebbs away underneath
the strange synths and harmonic scrapes. Manchester’s
very own Sanjuro 77 pay tribute to Frank Sidebottom’s
home town on “Night Falls On Timperley”, a ghostly
encounter of Gary Numan, Most Haunted and seedy nightclub
beats all brought together in a wild experiment. “Sanctuary”
by Edmund Coleman (Glasgow) provides the closing sounds and
maybe the most strange. Ad-hoc strikes of synthetic glockenspiels
and Japanese chimes calmly close this album.
Catch Of The Day is a collection of the weird and the wonderful
with an ear firmly on the experimental. But within this, every
note is accessible and veers happily between dance, traditional
forms and even folk. It’d be so easy to create a dance
orientated record or a bag full of acoustic numbers –
it’s another matter entirely to go out looking for people
exploring the netherworld between current trends. It’s
not just a moral, artistic victory though. Everything on this
tastefully limited eight track record is well worth engaging.
MMMM
www.music-dash.co.uk
Right, I'm done reading this
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