BLOKE – sennin taoist immortal

(free mp3 album, g6pd)

Israel is becoming a more and more interesting place to search for music on my personal landscape, see Poochlatz for further information, though this album is a completely different kind of something than Poochlatz. Actually, it is a real bastard kind of record, being spawned in 1999 as a 10-track album and now remastered, edited, enlarged to 15 tracks and put out for free by Yaniv Navot, the main mind behind bloke as well as the label g6pd.

At first I pegged it as a freaked out electronica album for the upcoming summer due to the harsh beats and weirdly mixed bass-sounds that I like to wiggle my butt to sometimes. Somehow the first listen made me think of si.begg or some of the more freakish stuff on trapez. But then, when summer refused to come and I took some indepth listenings to “sennin taoist immortal”, I realized that behind the beats that crowd tracks like “Extract” or “Japan” there is some serious, almost structuralist experimenting in sounds going on. The result of this is Navot seemingly being more interested in the way sounds change in miniscule details when doubled or layered more than the effects of putting various sounds over one another. Then he will add chimes on top of each other to see what happens in the overtones of the sound or kick contrasting yet corresponding sounds into the mix together to let them bounde around. The aptly named “La Musiq” is one nice example.

The balance to the more edgy and awkward yet more compelling and rewarding songs is held by straight forward tracks aimed more directly at the dancefloor (or at least the chill out area) such as the Kraftwerk-hommage “80286” or the Planet Mu / breakbeat noise inferno of “Polyaquaternium 6” or “Yon Turtle”. Obviously, variety is also an important working theory for Navot. Especially when he gives 80ies synthies and harmonies, even emulating the weak snare beats of back then, the V/VM-treatmeant, ie. distortion and noise, things not only turn for the weird but also for the funny (see “in conflict with the code” for reference.

Another one would be a certain but distinctive crudeness and rawness in the production. “sennin taoist immortal” is in now way the clean cut and polished production that we have come to expect from the big electronica warehouses, but posesses an immediateness and rough edge that is more appealing (at least to me). This might come from the original tracks being produced on an old computer almost seven years ago – a lifetime in electronica – but that edge is still there in the remastered version.