No Pain In Pop

Night Shift

There’s no-one harder to write about than Teengirl Fantasy. Oberlin, Ohio students Logan Takahashi and Nick Weiss don’t so much make music as sound fugues that drift across the consciousness removing all thoughts of time and place. The starchy, paradise house of ‘Floor To Floor’ feels as though it has to be earned, like a destination it took too long to reach, synths and pipes floating across your dream horizon as refreshing and fluffy as both cold sides of Atlas’s pillow. Hearing is replaced by sight, logic by colours. It’s fantastically disorientating.

There’s no-one harder to write about than Teengirl Fantasy. I don’t deserve this music. You don’t either. Bliss can be found, however, in the form of the four-track TGIF EP, posted with band blessing at the tireless Pukekos.



MP3: Teengirl Fantasy - Floor To Floor

Tags: pukekos, teengirl fantasy

Swinging Jaw: Sonic Youth

“Wherever we go we usually take a guy along with a hammer and a nail..”

Full transcript of interview with Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth follows - feature appears in the next Tank magazine.



MP3: Sonic Youth - Sacred Trickster

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Tags: sonic youth, what the fuck do you ask sonic youth?

Throwing shapes at horizon’s edge

Having spent the last few years picking modestly at the scraps, Patten are now digging their teeth in deep on Liquid Liquid’s fleshy carcass. Following the careful calm of their debut, There Were Horizons (available here), they’ve now found their feet (the new moves kindly thrown out by those excellent gents at 20JFG) with the London-based troupe returning with the release of Sketching The Tesseract later this year via Kaleidoscope (previously responsible for releasing champion auteur Arch M’s Mountain Tan Commercials among other gems).

An EP precedes the full release, entitled GLAXJO XAACSSO, and these are some of the fruits.



MP3: Patten - Version (test mixxx)



MP3: Patten - Grey Gold (testt mixxx)

Tags: kaleidoscope, patten

Paradise Vendors

Chaps, grasp glands for London’s Male Bonding, three sorts getting fresh with that swamp-bass-super-sound and the teenage poltergeist scar-isms of a pink punk past. Descended from (early) Descendents, gay for Gray Matter, ‘Rehearsal Song’’s tuneful racket seems made B(y).S(aturdays).F(or).S(aturdays)., rising sober, miraculously enough, to turn up at your friend’s house with an amp and some plugs just as mother and father are heading out to John Lewis for salad and furnishings. Male Bonding are no flannel arrivistes, there back in the Smell-sent days, as the first lo-fi rumbles moving across the water were picked up by alien wave stations hunkered down somewhere in the undergrowth plunge of Epping Forest.

Male Bonding’s Paradise Vendors Inc label yesterday issued another slab of Eden in the form of a four-way split that grapples to gather a quartet NPIP favourites: Old Blood, Graffiti Island, Rapid Youth (the Murietta collective) and, of course, MB themselves. Get it here.



MP3: Male Bonding - Rehearsal Song

Tags: graffiti island, male bonding, old blood, paradise vendors inc, rapid youth

Trailin U

This anonymity of Sbtrkt’s is deft - ravenous for some kind of ID, the mental blanks where face and name should be are filled instead with the vague, twilight greens clubland tosses out onto the nearest pavement, or the mangled and maudlin features of those half-remembered from yesteryear raving. In namelessness the barrier between him and the music is removed, until Sbtrkt is the predatory, queasy, proto-Hazyville bass rapidly gaining on itchy percussion that seems to jitter and splash across the mid-range, terrified, no doubt, by the cold eyes on such an adamant, iron-willed dub. Breaking up occasionally into the bliss of blameless panic attacks, this cut edit of ‘Rundown’ gradually finds harmony between the two, steppa’ chug catching up with delirious house breaks, the two entwined in dramatic sparring while ‘Digidesign’ sound swarms beleaguer throughout.

Already played out by Alexander Nut at Rinse, Sinden at Kiss and Blackdown at El-B’s Plastic People re-launch, Sbtrkt’s attracted words from the learned heads at FACT, too - his releases to come this year (EPs through Salvia and Zomby’s Brainmath imprint) are gathering much anticipation.



MP3: Sbtrkt - Rundown (Edit)

Tags: brainmath, salvia, sbtrkt

Engineering Research Test 8333

MP3: Aphex Twin - Xtal

Tags: aphex twin, channel 8333