I LOVE the new Benga record! I especially love Benga’s particular twist on dubstep and the acid house influences that weave throughout this album. Listening to Diary of an Afro Warrior, I feel transported to a renegade soundsystem party, under the stars, listening to Benga create synasthaethetic stories on the fly! ([More →])

I originally wrote this album review of the new Autechre record - Quaristice - for my “day job” at MOG.com. This is a slightly different version here because you are a different audience!

Longtime fans of Autechre will probably be ecstatic about Quaristice. It hearkens to early Autechre music - more experimental, more chaotic, and less dance friendly than the last 4 albums or so. I’ve been a fan for ages and bought nearly every album they ever released. But I started to pine for their earlier sounds, when they were trailblazing the experimental electronic scene that later became known as IDM. This is the Autechre album I was longing for! If this sounds like you, you need to listen to Quaristice!

Autechre will gain many new fans with this album at the same time they renew most of their existing fan base.

Overall, the album sounds less clinical than many of Autechre’s more recent releases. The sounds evolve more organically and the sequences have more random elements to them. I LOVE it! The synths on Quaristice sound like an Evolver (Dave Smith Instruments) with its quirky sounds and step sequencers. If it isn’t an Evolver, I would still hazard a guess that this music was inspired by some new piece of hardware. It’s just a guess, but this album sounds so much like a return to hardware for the band. Either that or some serious cut-ups and processing like the Matmos albums based on surgery instruments.

Autechre explore new ground with the use of human vocal elements on “IO” (something they rarely incorporate). The human vocal is nicely balanced by one of the most recognizable machine voices ever: a Speak-n-Spell (or Speak-n-Math). The main vocal in “IO” isn’t very comprehensible since it’s filtered through what sounds a bit like a megaphone and a distortion petal. It’s graininess is perfectly complemented by the digital voice of the T.I. toy.

([ Click To Add "IO" To Player ])

A few songs into the album, it begins to remind me of certain songs by Coil: experimental synth stuff like Elph vs. Glitch or Music To Play In The Dark or similar… My impression keeps changing with each song, because they all sound so different. The tempo varies widely from one song to the next, from ambient washes to triplets at 120 bpm. However, the closest thing to a dance track in the collection is the schizophrenic hip hop beats of “90101″ that sound like a Timbaland production on 45 rpm.

It wasn’t until Track 17 “WNSN” that I started to hear the Autechre that we have come to know in more recent years. A few tracks later, “Notwo” (track 19) gets so minimal it’s downright zen. “Notwo” and “Outh9X” (the last two tracks of the album) are pure atmospheric bliss, very similar to the planetary music of murcof, and a beautiful way to fade out the album. This is an unexpected pleasure of Quaristice - the music varies so much. No two songs are alike and they convey a range of influences and skills.

Autechre will gain many new fans with this album at the same time they renew most of their existing fan base.

Kafani (Baby Face Assassins, “Hyphy Ill”) dropped his solo debut into the hyphy movement with the release of Money’s My Motivation on Koch Records. Read the album review where we put Kafani to the HearingTest, so you don’t have to:

Kafani - Money’s My Motivation Album Review on HearingTest

The Pack are a little bit skate-punk-rap; like the Beastie Boys if they was from the Yay Area. And Based Music is a bit like hyphy if it took a chill pill…

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Kafani is destined to rule the town with his new album Money’s My Motivation, out now on Koch Records. Smooth, laid back hip hop beats and rich synthesizer bass lines are rolled into this bumpin hyphy soundtrack. I’ll admit, I’m homesick for hyphy. I lived in Oakland for a long time, only recently moved across the bridge to San Francisco. Hyphy still sounds like home to me. I smile whenever I hear it rattling trunks and turning leather seats into massage chairs. I haven’t had a chance to test the new Kafani CD in one of those cars yet, but I did the next best thing - I played it on the home audiophile’s version of boxes in the trunk: a pair of KRK Rokit 6’s with 12″ subwoofer. This system is very similar to what most boosted car systems sound like, so it was a good fit for a banging hyphy album. Here’s what I heard…
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