- There are just so many ways one can enjoy music. You can, for example, enjoy the sound. You can enjoy the colour of the sound: you can taste it, feel it and see it. Electronic sounds may take you far away - to the future, or perhaps to space. Guitars may take you home. Another layer would be enjoying the vitality of music: music lets us connect, it stimulates us to feel people's passion for life, to feel their creativity and strength translated into playing instruments, into movement.
Furthermore, the human mind has something similar to the anti-shock mechanism you see in portable music players - the mechanism which remembers the next couple of minutes of the song in advance. The human mind doesn't skip of course, but it enables us to enjoy the music as a whole, intelligent piece. You can enjoy your memory of it, the previous couple of seconds and the seconds about to arrive. That's why, I guess, mash-ups and remixes sometimes work so well. The vocals remind us of the original song, and then we make most of the music up in our imagination. Take, for example, Villalobos' remix of Depeche Mode's 'The Sinner In Me': it’s an extremely delicate minimal work built mainly around puny signs that we automatically associate with the original.
The Emperor Machine put to use an amazing number of those options. Andy Meecham has been around for a while, as a part of electro-bass outfit Chicken Lips, putting out Italo-Disco records as Sir Drew, and now comes his full second LP as TEM. ‘Vertical Tones’ arrives after a long series of twelve-inches (apparently released to conserve real-time dynamics and please the vinyl worshippers), taking a swift turn to what's fashionably designated today as Kosmische, AKA what Daniele Baldelli et al would call Cosmic Disco. It’s a style that’s revitalizing great cuts from the seventies, possibly in reaction to minimal techno's mathematical saturninity.
Minimal might be great for the Berlin School, its strict form taking melody and rhythm one step forwards, or backwards (depends on your perspective). The Emperor Machine does the opposite: the melody is all over the place and the instrumentation is live in an almost sneeringly blatant manner. Multilayered as its name, 'Vertical Tones & Horizontal Noise' coats electronic pulses vertically while congas, cowbells and other rhythm instruments gush horizontally. It’s a fun record that would be fierce enough for the psych-punk-funk crowd, and it’s a true demonstration of the capabilities of the London-based DC Recordings label, home of Padded Cell, The Emperor Machine and other Chicken Lips members and acquaintances.
The influences are clear: anything analogue, anything counter-technological. Meecham tries to give this record - to paraphrase a great poet – 'a borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered seventies' and he succeeds: The sound is warm and vinyl. Krautrock and no-wave live in harmony here, more evidence that this is a reaction to the often somber minimal sound. Let's go back, let's not go digital, but let's stay relevant. Most of the cuts are excellent, from the western movie stylings of 'Yes No Egg' to the clever palindromic beauty of 'Rimramramrim'. Although at times tracks lose some solidity, perhaps the result of Meecham listening to too many different muses.
All in all, if you were looking for another electrohouse stomper that would make you dance and sweat but feel a bit lonely afterwards, don't look over here. If you loved Rephlex's reissue of Black Devil, you're a sucker for vintage sounds and even in 2007, you still understand how music should be listened to, you have just found what you were looking for all this time.
Tracklist1 Who You?
2 Yes No Egg
3 Roller Daddy
4 The Avalution Of Eight
5 Lift Up Chong & See
6 Monkey Overbite
7 No Sale No ID
8 Bodilizer Bodilsizer
9 Rimramramrim
10 Fear Of Woman
11 Seka Wants Your VCS3
12 Something From The Cox-Dorée Institure
13 Tropical Waste
14 The Avalution Of Seven