This week at Juno

Joey Anderson’s second album a long player from JT The Goon and Beau Wanzer’s hook up with Corporate Park to EPs by Acronym, map.ache and Tessela.

JT The Goon – King Triton (Oil Gang)

It’s been a fine year for instrumental grime across the board, but in such a buoyant and ever-mutating corner of the UK club scene there’s always room for more fresh ideas. JT The Goon has been ripping it up for Oil Gang for the past couple of years, alongside Murlo and as part of Edgem as well as on his own Twin Warriors EP, but now the London-based Slew Dem crew member is stepping out with a glittering full-length tribute to that most grimey of instruments, the mighty Korg Triton. Where a lot of his peers are edging towards murky, obtuse and downright freaky territory, JT is happily firing off bright and bold melodies delivered with a necessary swagger. Matching those lead flutes, chimes and strings with weighty low end, all twelve tracks get under your skin in an instant. All hail the King!
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DJ Sotofett – Percussion Mixes Vol 1 (Fit Sound)

If there’s one cat out there who knows how to make a drum track sound utterly thrilling, it’s surely our man from Moss, DJ Sotofett. Consummating the connection between the Sex Tags mafia and Aaron Sigel’s Fit Distribution operation, this link-up finds the Norwegian maven on his best possible form with a couple of sure shot club smashers for the exotic underbelly of the contemporary party landscape. “Tribute To Sore Fingers” urges all manner of eyes-closed drum circle reverie bolstered by a surefooted house gait, while “Houran (Percussion Mix)” finds Sotofett jamming with hitherto unfamiliar instrumentalist Abu Sayah. If you have an irrational hatred for piles of tumbling drum sounds then you’d best avoid this record, but if the idea of long-form excursions into the heart of the beat flick your switch, then pop the needle down and get your body jerking.
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Corporate Park / Beau Wanzer – CP/BW (Unknown Label)

It certainly doesn’t sound like Christmas has arrived for Corporate Park and Beau Wanzer, not that you’d really expect sleigh-bell toting schmaltz from such a pairing of learned techno savages. The CP duo of J. Lange and S. English are known for but a few obscure tapes and CDRs on labels as appealing as Sexkrime Arts reaching back to 2009, while Wanzer is rarely quiet between his multitude of collaborations such as Civil Duty and Mutant Beat Dance. This album seems to follow an aesthetic path from Wanzer’s solo debut LP in 2014, but here there is more opportunity for madcap noise tinkering to enter the gravelly, overdriven sound scape. Dive into the wonderfully unhinged bleep scuzz of “Bored Hurt” with its fractious vocal wailings, and we defy you to resist the absolute muckiness of it all.
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Ossia / Chester Giles – Shackles (Empty Head Rich Heart)

After the over-powering gloom of “Red X” and its versions, anything was going to sound like a step towards the light for Ossia. The Young Echo affiliate has rightly drawn some favourable attention this year even as his production career is only just edging into the public consciousness, but following on from that Blackest Ever Black debut he’s back once more with YE compadre Chester Giles to elicit more stripped and strange dub abstractions out of dusty old boxes. “Shackles” is a mournful, feedback riddled lurch at an undead pace, and sounds magnificent for it, but the real gem is “Anpao” with its devastatingly simple premise. Disheveled drum machine pulse and distant, delicate melodics are all it takes to create a powerful, arresting piece of music, and despite its innate uneasiness it manages to be cheerier than Ossia’s previous outing.
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Consumer Electronics – Dollhouse Songs (Harbinger)

Power electronics always seems like a rather playful term for some of the most extreme renegades to operate in the angriest corners of industrial music. Having existed in various forms since the early ‘80s, Consumer Electronics as they are today comprise prolific noise antagonist Russell Haswell, more recent line-up addition Sarah Froelich and former Whitehouse vocalist Philip Best. If ever music had the power to peel off layers of skin, this formidable trio would be a logical port of call, but there is a purpose behind the sonic madness. In Best and Froelich’s frenzied rants a coherent political message is being broadcast, and the snarling sheet metal sonics that rage behind them hammer the point home with devastating power. It’s certainly not pleasure music, but then the subject matter is rarely pleasant, and that’s a vital facet of confrontational art at a time when so little of it exists.
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Acronym – Ashes (Northern Electronics)

Spearheaded by Abdullah Rashim with constant support from his Ulwhednar collaborator Varg, Northern Electronics are undeniably a pivotal force in techno music right now. Until recently NE regular Acronym could have been described as a ‘mysterious’ techno producer but with a Discogs profile picture now live, he’s indeed proved to be a finely dressed Swede who knows how to wear crisp white shirt. Nevertheless, Acronym’s music remains inexplicitly arcane and this Ashes EP, following his album from earlier this year, sees the producer maintain the glacier vibe of the label, with soft undertones of celestial synths in tact, however there is a harder edge to some of the tracks through the diablo bobble of arpeggios in “Exile” and “Siege”.
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Katsunori Sawa – Secret of Silence (Weevil Neighbourhood)

The Weevil Neighbourhood may not release all too much music but that’s exactly what makes Martin Heinze’s label so appealing, or should we say enigmatic. Japanese producer Katsunori Sawa is largely responsible for the diabolical sound the label delivers, a crossways point between shamanistic techno, wierdo drum and bass, industrial breaks and power electronics. Secret of Silence is the sound of Sawa’s debut album which follows two other solo 12”s he’s released on the label plus other music as Bokeh and his otherworldly Steven Porter collaboration with Yuji Kondo. This album will be nothing like anything else you’ve heard this year, and if it were to be personified it conjures imaginary images of a giant, cyborg-like creature lumbering through a landscape of urban decay destroying everything in its path.
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map.ache – The Golden Age (Giegling)

With Giegling gracing many top label lists this year it pays testament to the Weimar collective’s continual support of their own artists. map.ache, aka Jan Barich (Kann Records boss), is a close friend of the Giegling crew who sees his music venture away from its Leipzig locale with a warm and stylistically melancholic five-track EP. map.ache’s trademark colourful tones are on show in “The Golden Age” while for something shady-turned-euphoric there’s “Give Peace A Change”. Furthermore, there’s something undeniably sketchy about “Message To Myself” and you’ll find Giegling’s rustic charm in the somewhat self-effacing B3-cut “You R The Bonus”.
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Joey Anderson – Invisible Switch (Dekmantel)

Before we’ve even had time to get our heads around the (delayed) Basic Soul Unit LP, a second album by Joey Anderson surfaces following his debut long player last year. In comparison to the abstract style of house music on After Forever, described by Oli Warwick as “psychedelic smatterings of piano, abstract vocal samples and strange brews of synth strings,” Invisible Switch is somewhat easier to consume. With beats and melodies more palatable this time around, the New Jersey producer approaches the album format from a straighter angle. The music however is far from functional but it still services the club in an abstruse, frenetic and fresh form that sounds as though it’s come from a uncanny realm of sound only the likes of DJ Qu and Terrence Dixon have access to.
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Tessela – Luv Mix (Poly Kicks)

It’s easy to imagine Tessela having a Hodge-like hit on his hands here with the melody hook of this record’s title-track, however the tremolo effect  – or is it a bad cable connection – reduces some juice from a luscious A-side cut. We’re not complaining though as there’s nothing like adding a bit of dirt to give something another taste and that’s exactly what Ed Russell has done here on “Luv Mix”. It’s the second title for Russell’s own Poly Kicks label which he launched in 2013 with certified London banger Hackney Parrot, but more to the point, the B-side to this 12”, “Tenner Eclipse”, is as ravey and dubbed out bassline fun as Kevin Saunderson’s all time classic “E Dancer”.
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