It’s a welcome 2021 return to AcidTed for Padre Tóxico. This time the more usual laid back beats are replaced by something much more drum and bass leaning.
Poland’s Padre Tóxico has a new album out – The Tripping Point. And here’s Interdrumentional Parkour from the album. It’s a departure from his more hip hop flavoured study beats and steps gently into light drum and bass.
The track has a dreamy quality that soon moves up a gear as the beats arrive and give it a sense of urgency. And yet it never quite loses that spacey, trippy quality. The piano continues to ripple away with that touch of reverb. It’s skittish in its run across galaxies but wide-eyed at the same time. Let this tack run around the corners of your mind.
I’m ending the week with a bang. A new track from Adam Helder but this time working with Erik Schievenin on their monster of a track Statherian.
Adam Helder has been here enough times not to need an intro. But this is the first time I think I’ve featured Erik Schievenin. He’s an Italian producer born in Belluno. He described himself as producer/remixer and Sound Designer. He’s also label owner for Unbelievable Records.
This is their second outing together, after Rhyacian. Again they’ve gone for a geological title. The Statherian is the last geological period in the Palaeoproterozoic. It began 1.8 billion years ago and ended at 1.6 billion years ago. The supercontinent Columbia formed at the beginning of this period.
Statherian is a happily expansive track. A mix of prog house and techno. But it also has a sort of prog rock root in the way that is manages the opening section, allowing the spiraling synth work to build before breaking out into a gallop (reminded me a bit of Deep Purple’s Child In Time). It’s an unashamed good time track, greedily occupying the main room. This is strobing, dry ice, peak time stuff. And all the better for it. There are melodic arpeggios and a groove made of a billion year geological kick. No wonder Benny’s smiling. This is one space cadet who’s destined for a good time with Statherian.
May only have been a four day week here but the run in to the weekend feels as tough as any five day week. Need something soothing to accompany another bout of aimless cloud watching. Some delicious dub techno is on the menu from Russia’s Mitry.
The track is The Sun. It’s taken from an EP of the same name. Most dub techno tends to follow the original German template of spectral dub and chilly austere techno. This is different. Perhaps because Mitry is from Russia there’s a warmth to this track. It has an analogue sounding heart and the addition of some ambient dreaminess that makes this a track apart. One to hold close and cherish.
And if you liked that check out this Drift Deeper Dub Techno set
After the Easter weekend you may be back to work today and feeling as sluggish as me. If you are, and even if you’re not, here’s something to ease you back in. A downtempo chilled groove track with a little experimentation to tickle your musical taste buds.
Mishegas is Emilio Quezada Ibañez, an Mexico-born and New York City-based artist, producer, and multi-instrumentalist. His name comes from a Yiddish word that can interpreted as hectic, crazy, or eccentric. There’s a bit of the Four Tet style about his work. It mixes diverse instruments and found sound in delightful ways.
The featured track is Feel It All which has had a remix from Kassian. They are duo Warren Cummings and Joe Danvers, based in 38East Studios, Hackney. The original track is a jittery but piano focused track that ripples with Spring sounds and warped electronics. The remix is a more downtempo and slightly more experimental affair. It moves from anything too euphoric into low key pitter patter wood blocks and bobbles. The focus of the track is on the slightly glitched rustling beats and the lovely sound of the xylophone. Abstract voices keen away but this track is down on the forest floor, among the leaf debris and the insects looking at the stars.
Electronic music has had long term interests in space both outer and inner. Perhaps it’s the drugs. But there’s more to it than that. A seeking after spiritualism and philosophical musings. Oh, and dancing your sock off. Obviously. Here’s Montreal-based Ficmaro to delve into questions of philosophy on Metaphysical.
Metaphysics examines the fundamental nature of reality, including the relationship between mind and matter, between substance and attribute, and between potentiality and actuality. The word “metaphysics” comes from two Greek words that, together, literally mean “after or behind or among [the study of] the natural”. And that’s what the sample in Metaphysical focuses on time and space being all part of the the illusion. But it’s the music around that really gets this to fly.
The track has an almost early 90s quality. A bit like early The Shamen. It’s acid house in a dreamy way but with beats precise enough that it’s about psychedelic or lucid dreaming, not drifting off to sleep. Sounds ripple and swirl in an old school analogue but unselfconscious way. They make you part of them and your philosopher talks on endless. A tumble of words like sitting under a waterfall with them pitter patter on your head. They become the tune. It’s one of the best enlightened lo-fi tracks I’ve heard in ages.
A trinity of tracks for Ambient Sunday from Marc Méan, Odyse, and Small Sounds. Tunes range from ambient drone to experimental to almost trip hop.
Marc Méan is a Swiss jazz pianist and keyboardist living currently in Zürich. But if you think you know what Abyss is going to sound like. Then, like me, you’ll be mistaken. This is a wonderfully fragile phased drone with an experimental edge. And that’s because it’s been composed on a Ciat-Lonbarde Cocoquantus. Meant nothing to me. But looking it up it says, “The CocoQuantus is a device by Ciat-Lonbarde composed of two Coco modules (8 bit digital delays) and a central “Quantussy” analog brain (nabra).”
What you’re left with is something that sounds a bit experimental but also deeply personal and more than a little sad. Melancholic sounds come and go amid the drone. It’s all about looking into the depths of feeling.
Odyse is from New York, USA. And I guess the sound is best described as folktronica. The track is called Fables and it’s a mix of almost Americana sounds alongside found sound and some trip hop beats. It has that outdoorsy feel with warped strings and forest shack porches. A bit of crackle of fires and stories of how things were. It has that type of quite nostalgic edge.
As Odyse says, “Take it on a solitary walk through the dampened forest, and look back on what was.” There’s beauty in the woods but also the ghosts of the lost past.
Small Sounds is Jacob Kemp, the lead guitarist for Brightline. But his solo work is electric and acoustic guitar mixed with synths. And featured track, Sam’s Song, is a mix of low key ambient synths with even lower key guitar. This is a ten minute mournful, thoughtful experience that recalls the good times and the bad through a haze of passing time. There’s something terribly ‘stop-what-you’re-doing’ about it. It never shouts for your attention or even does much at all. But it is a presence that demand its time and space in your life.
A track as seriously cold as the weather today and with an approach that’s as cutting as the wind from Anthropix.
Anthropix is Paul V from Hamburg. The track is Alienist, the opening track taken from his Cygnus EP. It’s a powerful and rather brutal affair. A no holds barred clean punchy techno track in that Dutch/German hard techno style. All mechanical digital and no analogue organic. This unearthly track has an unnerving unsettling quality to it as waves of beats and spirals of insect synths roll across the tune. It’s brilliantly alienated and alienating techno. Beware. Not for the faint hearted.
Let’s get the long Easter weekend up and running with a bang through a techno house remix from a Franco-German alliance of Worakls and Booka Shade.
Worakls is a French producer and Entrudo is a track from 2019’s Orchestra album. The original has a dark sheen alongside some almost neo classical sounding string motifs and crisp beats. As the track develops it becomes a bit more euphoric. It’s been given a set of remixes of which my favourite is from Booka Shade.
Berlin-based duo Booka Shade are Walter Merziger and Arno Kammermeier. Their best work has a crisp cleanness and their synth pop background means the have an ear for a good hook. This remix is no exception. They’ve kept the darkness of the original but it has that German techno cool about it. A pine forest freshness and the precise synth notes. This gives their remix a fleetness of foot that delivers a techno house piece of perfection that will work both in the darkness of the night and the brightness of the day.
OK, so I missed Trans rights day yesterday but let’s make up for that with a track from Grand Larsonie.
Grand Larsonie is Andrew from Baltimore, Maryland and self-describes as a piano/keyboardist, albeit he “manifests as psychedelic ambient jazz”. And he says “I fell in love with fast paced electronic music at an early age, and have been producing music for a little over ten years. ” But featured track Trans-porting is more about a slow strange IDM acidness.
The track opens with a warped funk bass from a fb330 synth and simple hip hop beats. But despite the ostensibly downtempo approach there’s a lovely psychedelic strangeness at work. Odd sounds bobble about giving it an IDM sheen. It manages to give itself an acid sense without the usual acid squelches. It’s club music but where everything is happening in slo-mo. All quite wonderfully disorientating.
What is organic house, please? It seems to appear in my submissions and timelines a lot these days. This lovely new track from Julius Abel is pitched as organic house. Seems like a chilled house track to me.
Julius Abel is a Vienna-based producer who has been around for the best part of 10 years or so. His new track is Solitude. And yet there’s nothing mournful or wandering lonely as a cloud about it at all. It’s a brilliant mix of deep house smoothness with a chilled house atmosphere that still manages to have a danceable edge. Even if the dancing is by yourself alone in a forest.
The beats are perky but what makes this track fly is the use of a tickle of a guitar lick that’s used quite sparingly in the track but whose riff seems then taken forward by the synths. This gives the tune a lovely hip shaking slightly Latin vibe whilst still remaining soft and gentle. This doesn’t try too hard but is more uplifting than the first coffee of the day.
