Traxx - To The Beat Bizarre!

Lumberjacks in Hell

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Don’t you just wish that sometimes dance music would free itself of the homogenised sonic straightjacket it imposes? A record that careers and veers in and out of different ideas, melodies and textures rather than having some sort of monotonous production throughout built with the safety and security of the dancefloor in mind. Built to confound and surprise rather than ebb into monotony and ultimately, obscurity.

Melvin Oliphant III makes records like that, and this latest release is no exception. The A-side is a 13 minute slo-mo Italo-Jack marathon of grandeur, utilising every ounce of Chicago spirit drawn from his drum machines. It’s the sort of record that only he can really make and the sound, raw and wonderfully noisy,  is still hugely alien to much of the rest of dance music, which means that what he does is even more vital. The B-side “an Insane experiment”, at 9 minutes, is truer to ‘normal’ jack territory, but one can never have enough of those records if you ask me. Essential.

Toby Frith

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