Crowdpleaser & St. Plomb - 2006

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  • Crowdpleaser & St. Plomb have nailed it. Perhaps their title is a cheeky claim to 'the Title' – 2006 may well be the year of '2006'. Well, I don't want to get ahead of myself. It's only April, after all, and my other hunch is that 2006 is the year techno mastered the artist-album, if recent and forthcoming works are anything to go by. But I do get the feeling that I mightn't be the only person pencilling in this slinky, rumpy l'il microverse into my top ten list. Ask me again in December. '2006' slips in between a lot of things, serving up a heterotopia sanded smooth by impressively artisanal sound design and keenly spaced and placed movements. The whole work glides with the effortlessness of a well considered mix, where what you might assume would be incongruous incompatibilities get friendly, grow asses, and get the urge to shake them together. It's a smooth mover, but not frictionless. '2006' seems to point out that the super-slippery soundspace of a lot of minimal music is not so much a fasterfaster future as a grey space where a certain kind of nothing keeps happening, over and over again. In place of grey wastes we have taste with waist– a stuffed sack of influences: on Zukunft you can hear shades of Mr Oizo, Green Velvet's 'Leave my Body', and Robag's earlier, more whimsical workouts for Musik Krause. 'Today' moves further into a straight techno vein, again with shades of Velvet, and perhaps a dash of Koze's (anti)climactic tactics – it gets tense, it gets intense, and often doesn’t release before moving on, pulling it off by leaving it hard, if you dig. My favourite tracks though wouold have to be the mesmeric ambient pieces that bookend the album, 'Early', with its gliding synth scales, and the finisher 'Last', which is so much the shoegazer sigh-trance atmosphere Nathan Fake tried and failed to conjure on 'Drowning in a Sea of Love'. It's a blissout which works perfectly alongside the panultimate track '123' that begs to be played loud and proud to a dance floor in the process of losing their shit. Instead of just re-presenting their influences with updated sound design, they've sublimated them, and they come back as ghosts in the machine, the many shades of Cajual, but equally Maurizio, Koze, L'il Louis, & whole chunks of the electro-micro-minimal continuum. In each case, Crowdpleaser and St. Plomb have managed to own all they evoke. While it’s hardly the-masterpiece-we’ll-still-be-catching-up-on-in-five-years a la 'We Are Monster', there’s an artful neatness to the complete work, it all 'fits' beautifully: it's funky, fun and functional. Crowdpleasing with aplomb.
RA