VARIOUS ARTISTS

bip_hop generation vol.7

CD, Bip Hop

There are only few compilation series in electronic music as long-lasting as “bip hop generation” and only a tiny percentage of those progressive, interesting and artistically articulate as well. The mindless, numb celebration of exclusive boredom and luxurious lounging as presented by Café Del Mar or the Playground compilations are only comparable in terms of shaping place and time of the listener. While those only act as sonic tapestry to a hyperrealistic imitation of a live straight from the life-style magazines, bip hop generation has a whole deeper and different objective: to pursue explorations into time and space themselves by thrusting variations into it by means of sound. Ambient in its most basic meaning, that is.

Also rarely ever will you find a compilation so effectively packing one exhaustingly growing and spreading genre. Unlike Japanese punkrock or Brazilian deathmetal, who still have gazillions of bands around but who are easy to compile, because they all sound exactly alike. Because they all want to sound exactly alike, otherwise they wouldn’t be true to their own style. The electronic music on this side of the shore wants and needs to be different. The introversion into sounds, pure sounds, and the endless flowing into their combination makes this scene so lively and interesting.

When time starts to freeze, relatively, cognitively, as an effect of vibrating sounds that soothe or distort in an almost subconscious way, the effect on the perception of place also changes. We have been conditioned by nature to conjure sounds with movements – if nothing moves, no sound is made. The concept of the sonic wave is easily understood and unbreakable. But digital means help sonic artists to build surroundings of sound that contrast those combinations. Hence the tracks of Taylor Deupree sound so forlorn and static as if lost in time, and only under strenuous concentration are the breaks and movements easily perceptible. Other than that it is like waking up from a daydream.

In comparison, Emisor will sound almost funky and lively. In any other contrast, he would be the weird kid on the compilation. The same is true for Canadian avantgarde hip hopper Ghislain Poirer, maybe the first encounter of the label with that genre. But their music also has that spatial quality of measuring sound more in square feet than in time, while offering the tracks most suitable for clubs. Open-minded, avantgarde-obsessive clubs, that is, due to the noises, digital clicks and estrangement effects. I love that bass-sound on “disolucion imaginaria” by Emisor. Both artists are able to carve a grooving, basic beat out of sounds at first glance completely unfit for dancefloors. And the are and ever will be. Nevertheless, they do groove.

The main highlights, to me, of the compilations are the epic tracks by Fonica (“scoot” at 11:44 minutes) and by Janek Schaefer (“Vasulka Vauban’s “A day in the good life” at exactly 10:00 minutes – that is no accident). With such a length the effects of shaping space and time by sound can be laid out much more intricately, intriguingly and deceptively. For Schaefer it is no surprise, he being a learned architect, someone used to shape time and life and sounds by places. These two tracks drone in the most delicate way, using small sounds to build gigantic domes. One half of Fonica, Keichi Sugimoto, is a member of Minamo, who have been praised in these pages for their “beautiful”-CD (on apestaartje) and here they deliver again. Gentle yet distorted guitars pluck their way through a flowerbed of music.