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> Press
-For i broke my robot's "tomorrow does not exist"- From XLR8R.com Weekly Top Ten When an album claims on its press sheet to be “the soundtrack to a 14th century torture chamber played by modern electronics and the Boston Philharmonic,” there’s not way we’re not having a listen. Tomorrow Does Not Exist is an intricately orchestrated train wreck of breakbeats and IDM, and really does sound, in some places, like you’re trapped in an iron maiden. Deliciously dark and definitely not for fans of the Postal Service. Jennifer Marston From Sonic Curiosity This release from 2007 offers 49 minutes of snappy ilbience. I Broke My Robot is Robbie Hartless. Extreme BPMs dominate this music. The percussion is artificial, harsh, high-velocity, and indefatigable. Fast breaks abound as the tempos lurch between different time signatures. Quite often, the rhythms are cocooned in fuzzy glows that bestow an electrified energy to the impacts. A bevy of electronics accompany the percussion. Strange electronics, crafted with the precise intent of sounding more alien than usual, enhance the otherworldly edge exuded by this tuneage. As far as range goes, the sounds burst from high and low. Sharp glitches pierce the psyche with near painful penetration. Deep bass tones growl with bestial ferocity. Amid this miasma of rapid-fire elements lies a dreamy undercurrent generated by eerie keyboards. These sedative threads provide an interesting balance for the music's frenetic character. Of course tomorrow doesn't exist, not while music like this forces the listener to focus on immediacy in order to keep up. A half-second breath can leave one helplessly stranded in the moment while the tune races away at breakneck pace. For all their savagery and hyperactivity, these compositions possess a high degree of harmony. The melodies are frantic, yet engaging. Their rapid delivery only increases their appeal, as tunes belt out with enough force to shatter concrete and leave lasting impressions on the audience. - Matt Howarth From Audiversity This review should've been done weeks ago, but what ordinarily takes only a few hours has grown to day after day of worrying and fretting and procrastinating. Sort of like Black Dice, I feared writing about this record... But not because it was a twisted pop record with a concept review waiting for it. No, Virginia's I Broke My Robot was something I feared writing about because I just could not delve deep enough. Tomorrow Does Not Exist is a virtually impenetrable wall of digital hardcore and late-90s techtronic wizardry that would make Prefuse 73 jealous if he were into that sort of thing. Robbie Hartless has the perfect name for his music: All humans, please check your expectations at the door and bring only something to receive the goodness found within. "I'll Be Alone" starts you off exactly how the rest of the record will carry you: With clicks, clacks, beats and bothers that come at you like a flood of sounds. Processing it all on the first listen is impossible, simple as that. "Take Alphacalm As Directed" is one of the best tracks here partly because it hit me immediately with the spacey atmospherics that help give it a human soul that feels like it's lacking so often on this record. A lot of people would take that as a diss, but in contrast I find it refreshing to be so incredibly difficult. There's something about I Broke My Robot's melodic touch that makes his music less intolerable than Mochipet. There's something about this album that gives me the will to listen to breakcore again. There's something about these songs that brings me back, over and over, to find something I recognize. It is always a struggle. Hartless lists himself as "Experimental / Jungle / IDM" on the ol' MySpace page. Though it may not necessarily be literal, a listener comes to find exactly what "jungle" means in Broken Fader Cartel's universe of cracked rhythms and Richard D. James anthologies. The density of his sampling and snapping and twisting and crackling found throughout this record is astonishing. It's a thick forest of electronics and your only way out is the airy synths that provide the backdrop for tracks like "The Afternoon We Tried Suicide." Unless microtones are your thing; in which case, have a gander at "Rebuild(d8t)," complete with a minimal glitch beat and more synthetics given just a hint of life, an organic feel in a sea of BPM blowouts and mind-collapsing mayhem. I already feel like I'm treading over the same paths other sources (XLR8R and CD Baby for starters) have hit, but the reason we all sound the same is because there's just nothing else. The artwork, conceptually simple but intricate in design, maps out perfectly what this record is all about: Put your brain at the mercy of a man who has sacrificed his own for an android's microchip. The result is that, on cursory listens, you come out feeling less human. That's when the weaker among you will take refuge in The Postal Service. If you keep listening, something else emerges. It may take days, or weeks, or maybe years if you stick with it (and who has the time to bother doing that anymore?), but Tomorrow Does Not Exist has a soul. Robbie Hartless has tried his damnedest to keep it from us, but I hear it. I hear it in the humanity that's been chopped to pieces on "The Further Away." I hear it in the Air-on-speed "Not So Fast, You're Hurting Me." You have to listen closely, closer than any hundred-dollar headphones can get you. Like any album worth its salt, going back always reveals something new. The secret is that Tomorrow Does Not Exist is not a casual listen but a rewarding full-length whose density ostensibly defines what cannot be described: the sensation of revealing the humanity hiding behind every binary beat. Air-tight? Not quite. Those who fear will follow. -For the BFC compilation "Cloud Control"- From XLR8R May 2007 Lock up your laptops, there's an old-fashioned '96 IDM revival happening- in North Carolina. Spread across 15 tracks, Cloud Control is both a survey and blender of the history of experimental electronic music, with this upstart label referencing and reformulating myriad highlights of the last 15 years of the noodly, cryptically named genre. From Tudikas Wayne Hunnicutt's ephemeral dreamscapes to a grime dripped Amen splatter from subQtaneous, the distinct vision of each particular artist is maintained throughout. Cloud Control is an auspicious debut from an unlikely place. Brion Paul. From Audversity Normally when we think of whatever "IDM" has come to mean in this post-Kid A or post-Give Up world, we think of the frosty north: Eskimos on laptops looking to an endless sun for inspiration, frostbitten Brits thinking their way around the NME, or Berlin ravers who are just "over it" and want something completely different. Even in the US, Jimmy Tamborello is about what "IDM" has come to in recent years, and he was northern California (San Francisco these days, I think). But electronica in its broken-beat or minimalist forms can come from anywhere. The tropical influence of South America, the underworld of Australia, California, whatever. This intrigue in what electronic can do and in the organic elements that make it so much more approachable than it was in the heady days of Autechre and Aphex Twin has helped it gain former guitar-and-drum loyalists at exponentially increasing rates in the last decade. One of the great bastions to rock-free-of-electronics and the idealist notion of "guitar rock" is the North Carolina Triangle Region. With a load of schools in a relatively condensed space - Raleigh is only about 40 miles from Durham, likewise to Chapel Hill and Carrboro, and Duke, UNC, NC State, etc. all call it home - there has always been a scene that has produced great bands and, of course, Merge Records stands as the ultimate testament to this. But electronica... That is not something you find a great deal of in the Southeast. Broken Fader Cartel is looking to change that. Their latest effort is their strongest: Cloud Control is a compilation featuring 15 different artists from five different countries that have all convened on this glitch-heavy label to provide a remarkable set of songs whose quality is supreme. Theodore Geisel would be proud, especially in the artwork that pays homage if only subtly. I first got into them last year when they sent Nauseous Youth Future's Dosage. Not expecting a great deal from Brian Flanders and a record label that was just three albums deep at the time, I was blown away by the fact that it was so competently and convincingly done by a dude from North Carolina rather than just "the north." As it turned out, this was just a microcosm of the label as a whole: Sampled here is the subQtaneous project, six main members the core in a 15-strong collective that has "o, he is not so evil," without the caps, is its featured song here. Scanone is an English DJ based out of East London and from a strictly visual standpoint, virtually none of the artwork in the back catalog looks anything like Cloud Control, but listening to "Spit," you see why this makes sense in the context of the compilation: Throbbing bass and tinny hi-hat persistence pay handsome dividends late in the album. I've never liked the idea of digging holes to bury artists in (or maybe I like making so many up, pigeonholes are ultimately rendered meaningless anyway) and burying labels is even worse, but if there really is such a thing as "IDM" and there is a "standard" to bear for it, Broken Fader Cartel must surely be flying the flag. All the sweeter, then, that they should mostly be coming from the unassuming college nucleus that is NC's Triangle. "Electronica comp warm and fluid" From The Daily Tarheel 3.5 Stars Not too long ago, people predicted that electronica would replace rock, that synthesizers and computers would replace guitars, and in some small way, people. That never happened, but electronic music never went away either. Enter Chapel Hill's Broken Fader Cartel collective and its latest release, the 15 track compilation, Cloud Control. Cloud Control shows a compromise with the cold, distant feel of a lot of electronica, instead working to create an organic sound with electronic apparatus. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but the album still is fun from start to finish. EFX's "MyStereoBot" employs a delicate piano line punctuated with a down-tempo drum machine and shimmering lounge-y synthesizers. When the glitch-pop rhythms kick in just after the 1:30 mark, the song already has shown its flesh and blood and introduces the convergence of man and machine as the track builds. Even when the songs don't seem to breathe and pulse with organic life as "MyStereoBot" does, listeners still are treated to high-quality glitch-pop. "O, He Is Not So Evil," by subQtaneous is a strictly electronic affair with spastic beats and atmospheric synth lines battling each other for the listener's attention, keeping the tension of the song engaging through its many twists and turns. Even without the organic melodies and perceived humanity of some of the compilation's other tracks, "O, He Is Not So Evil" shows itself to be a strong track. Where Cloud Control suffers is where most every compilation suffers: It doesn't seem to have a cohesive idea. This is easily attributed to the obvious fact that 15 artists likely don't share one common idea, but the album structure is just as strong on shuffle play. The compilation does do an excellent job of showcasing 15 artists from around the world in a way that allows listeners to tie them together by stylistic similarities, while allowing the artists to maintain their own identities. - Bryan Reed -For Nauseous Youth Future’s “Dosage”- “IDM is alive and well” From the December 2006 Raleigh Hatchet Pigeonholing— everybody hates it, but nobody can avoid it one hundred percent of the time. It would be a disservice to readers to avoid terms like Electronica, IDM or Glitch when describing this CD. Even though Dosage is full of delicious grooves, driving beats and sweetly musical if not melodic moments, I can’t pretend that guitar-headed neo-rockers are going to put one of these songs on their iPod playlist between The Mars Volta and Valiant Thor. Some folks just won’t ever be comfortable within the sterile digital soundsphere. At the same time it’s entirely unfair to Brian Flanders, a.k.a. Nauseous Youth Future, and to his potential fans to plop his debut release into categories that forward thinking electronicats might consider passé. The new trend seems to be more organic Electro and Dance-Punk. Dosage, although unmistakably “computer music”, projects its humanness through composition. It’s obvious that Flanders is feeling the funk, that he’s making music with his computer, not making his computer make music for him. It may not be rock, but it certainly does rock, so if DFA and Ladytron are starting to feel a little too cool for school, and you’re thinking of digging out your Squarepusher CDs, Give Dosage a listen. You can come back, baby, IDM never forgets. - Bart Tomlin From Sonic Curiosity Glitchy electronics vibrate with severe agitation alongside a bevy of scratchy e-perc rhythms. The notes glisten with synthetic luster, yet the riffs they describe are frequently infused with an endearing humanity peering through the impulsive miasma. The application of truncated samples accentuates the music's frenetic demeanor. The tempos are insistent and edgy, often frantic as beats crowd each other to achieve a buzzing blur of computerized impacts. Some beats come encased in fuzzy coatings which give them a novel appeal. Other beats are strictly artificial, harsh and intentionally alienating in their mechanical disposition. Contrasting this nest of seething diodes, heavenly tones provide a grounding presence with their atmospheric resonance. Lacy textures of ethereal substance saturate a tapestry of fevered pulsations. The compositions are a sinuous blend of strident perturbation and sultry ambience, mixing dreamy sounds with grating beats and achieving a bewitching air of urbane harmonies. - Matt Howarth "Best of the Tar Heel state: Top 10 albums" From The Daily Tarheel 7. Nauseous Youth Future, Dosage (Broken Fader Cartel) With Dosage, Chapel Hill's Nauseous Youth Future has created an emotionally powerful electronic soundscape that is as evocative as it is engaging. With its charming melodies and skittering glitch-pop rhythms, NYF crafts unpredictable but effortlessly accessible electronic music that lifts the lid on North Carolina's thriving underground electronica scene. Dosage shows the genre's uncanny ability to speak volumes on longing, sadness, jubilance and irreverence without the use of traditional lyric-based song forms. It commands attention, transcending the simple "dance" or "background" music tag often thrust upon electronica as a genre. "Crossing the Horizon" From the EMUSIC-L Weblog The blurb on CD Baby reads: "A singing canary being thrown into a helicopter engine, yet still able to sing within the grinding noise of the chopper." Well, yes. That's a good summary. But don't let this put you off. Dosage combines a real melodic sense (chords! form! modulations! more than one key!) and glitch done with style. Yes, it is possible, twenty-minute pointless laptop improvisations notwithstanding. Take slightly creepy, sometimes haunting, sometime plaintive melody. Add rhythm tracks ranging from straight-ahead shuffle to light-speed drum-n-bass, all completely composed of crunchy fuzzy squelchy noises, manipulated with a gleeful digital buzzsaw. Now the hard part: make it work. Dosage does. I'm normally not much of a glitch fan: too often the aesthetic seems to be more "I am obviously far more an artiste than you, for I like this" or maybe "man, I cannot believe you putting up with this and applauding". Nauseous Youth Future comes from a place that says "this genre has something to say that can't be said otherwise". Anything that does that is worth a listen. There's a lot of technical excellence here too. In-your-face, dry glitchiness combined with cavernous processed spaces - which are subject themselves to the glitch treatment in toto. There's also a good sense of musicality, with nice choices of instrumentation. No fear of allowing either pure glitch or pure melody its own time before recombining them again. Overall, I think this CD does a great job of bridging genres, with its own interesting aesthetic. Definitely worth a listen. - Joe McMahon "NYF a melodic dose of local synth" From The Daily Tarheel 3.5 stars Sometimes records are just good. Without a clear explanation or rationale, the music contained on a disc has the power to elicit emotion or thought, seemingly out of thin air. Such is the case with Dosage, the latest from Nauseous Youth Future, a member of Chapel Hill's Broken Fader Cartel collective. The melodic electronica of NYF shows the immense talent and creativity of its sole member, Brian Flanders. With NYF, Flanders has the ability to craft synthesized melodies that summon memories and emotions from listeners - whether it be longing, as on "hicountry" or jubilation as on the album's opener "why, separate knob, why?" Trapped within the confines of the melodies come the glitchy thumps of NYF's skittering beats, bouncing around seemingly at random and keeping the listener looking for a pattern in movement. The complex rhythms make the music hard to dance to, at least in a traditional sense of the term, but in headphones, the synapses in your brain have no option but to shake their groove thangs. Granted, Flanders and his NYF moniker are not the sole progenitors of this sort of electronic music, and crafting a 100 percent unique style is not the selling point here. The Broken Fader Cartel actually features several similarly styled acts, but the ability to fall into a genre does not take a thing away from the music contained on Dosage. Each song presents a mood, a story and a personality without relying on words to convey a message. They flow together as seamlessly as the events in life, carrying their own burdens and joys, but never feeling out of place in the grand scheme. As if without rhyme or reason, Dosage will grab you, force you to pay attention and leave you feeling better at the end. - Bryan Reed -For "Audible, Visible: A Night of Electronic Music and Abstact Art" in Chapel Hill NC, Oct. 2006- In daring difference- From Best Bets in the Indy Weekly Even though it lacks a permanent, consistent home base, the Triangle's electronic music scene is ultra-resourceful, empowered by both vision and dedication. In fact, the scene's relative transience could be what gives it the uncanny ability to take one weekend show at one club and turn it into a big event. That's what Chapel Hill-based electronic label Broken Fader Cartel has done with AUDIBLE, VISIBLE: A NIGHT OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC AND ABSTRACT ART. Broken Fader Cartel owner Brian Miller recruited five of his favorite electronic artists from across the state (including Hickory's fantastic NAUSEOUS YOUTH FUTURE, whose kitsch keyboards twist between glitch beats) and five visual artists. This Saturday, Oct. 21, the artists will install their work in NIGHTLIGHT as the musicians alternate sets, turning the Rosemary Street space into a multimedia immersion. It starts at 9 p.m. — Grayson Currin "Nightlight to host 'Audible, visible' collaboration" From The Daily Tarheel .com The fancies of both art and music lovers will be tickled Saturday at the Nightlight bar and club in Chapel Hill. "Audible, Visible: A Night of Electronic Music and Abstract Art" will showcase regional talent in both visual art and music. Hosted by record label Broken Fader Cartel, the event attempts to combine abstract forms of the perspective mediums of music and visual art, creating an artistic experience that focuses equally on both. "It's just an art gallery with an electronic music concert going on," said Brian Miller, who runs the label. "It's eye candy and ear candy." Miller met and collaborated with many of the artists who will be featured Saturday during his college years at UNC-Asheville. "All these people are my friends," he said. "I've known them for half a decade now." Miller said he got the idea for the program because of an inherent problem with the record label-produced shows - the lack of a visual element. "I come from a rock 'n' roll background," he said. "I'm used to having that visual association to music." Because electronic music is primarily digital, an audience often has little more to watch than artists sitting at their computers, he said. Brian Flanders, who performs under the alias Nauseous Youth Future, agreed that the visual aspect of live electronic music isn't the primary attraction. "People come out thinking it's going to be like a rock concert," he said. "The only thing I do is stand there, twist knobs and parameters, dance a little bit - there's not a whole lot of flash to it." Flanders, who will be debuting his new album, Dosage, at the event, is excited about the show's potential to bridge the gaps between two kinds of arts enthusiasts. "It'll get a lot of people that don't necessarily have any relativity to come out, get involved and check us out," he said. "I think everyone who loves art and loves music should come out." Hayden Wilson, a senior art major at UNC-A, often combines auditory and visual aspects in his artwork by creating neon art displays that respond to sound. "The nicest thing about these pieces is not only is it visual, but if you interact with it, you can actually kind of dictate what happens with the piece," he said. Wilson, who will be showcasing his art at the event, never has shown his work in an environment that incorporated live music. "I think when I get there, I'll play around with it until I get something that's really interactive, so it'll react to the music more." Wilson said he is glad to have found a venue that is so appropriate for his artwork. "I'm excited to see how people react to it," he said. "It's a good interaction - it makes the music a part of the piece as well." The event begins at 9 p.m. and admission is $5. Miller said he hopes it will cater to the tastes of all who attend. "You can come in and watch the live performances without even knowing the art's there," he said. "Or, you can look at the art gallery and just appreciate that. "We hope the eyes and the ears will stay occupied." - David Berngartt -For “The Collective Polycarbonate Release”- From the fine folks at CD Baby Broken Fader Cartel smears together harmony and rhythm with wide, oily brushstrokes, giving human qualities to electronic gurgles and evoking a landscape of the natural world. These are the soundscapes of consciousness when lulled and pacified, attuned to the higher purposes of existence. Their album bridges the organic and the robotic. From Dogmatick Glitch, dark ambient, illbient, soundscapes, noise guitar ambient... all sub-styles of the one big style called ambient music are present on this 11-track long private CD release. Sometimes a track is made by sampling natural sounds, then again industrial sounds, then purely made by layering various synths. Soundscapes are being built that show humanity in violent acts of deviant machines and others that show the dark side of human acts towards innocent machines. The modern city is reflected as is the old countryside. Organic robots and robotic organs all dance to the irregular beats of semi-repetivity. -Random- "Get Out, Music Worth Leaving the House For:" From The Indy Weekly Feb 2006 Broken Fader Cartel, Open Eye Café: Meet this Asheville electronic collective with an itch for the glitch of bent circuits, digital reconstructions, and a sense of humor to extinguish any of the nasty flames of pretense. With a kitchen sink approach, the Cartel keep the beeps and blurt scene free. 8 p.m. – CT "The Listening Room" From The Mountain Express Feb 2006 Placebo, Discount Plastic Surgery (broken fader cartel, 2003) Discount Plastic Surgery's first full-length release, Placebo, is the best local album I've yet found to write to. I've listened to it on a repeating loop for the better part of a weekend, and I'm still not bored with it. It's just aggressive enough to keep you in a forward-moving groove, yet it's still overwhelmingly relaxing electronica. Placebo, mildly dark and momentum-heavy, is much more accessible if slightly less experimental than Discount Plastic Surgery's self-titled debut from last year. This markedly consistent new album is masterful at establishing a mood just between soundtrack music for an action-movie car-racing sequence and the perfect aural background to a game of solitaire. Placebo manages an urban feel without being insultingly pop-hop-oriented in the process. If you're dying for a pop-music comparison, the new album feels similar at moments to Aphex Twin at their most brooding. Placebo never gets to quite the same place, however, staying just this side of fully ambient. In other words, this is exactly the kind of music to listen to as you fall asleep -- assuming you'd like to have dreams about being a cyber-punk anime hero running through the rain-slicked nighttime streets of a city lit by endless strings of neon. Or, in a pinch, you could use it as something to listen to while you type. Rating: 4 out of 5. - Steve Shanafelt From The Mountain Express Discount Plastic Surgery Self Titled EP (broken fader cartel, 2002) At its best, I can be deftly urban, darkly atmospheric, and surprisingly melodic. At its worst, it sounds like a rushed soundtrack for a cyber-punk anime flick. 4 out of 5 - Steve Shanafelt From music.alutis Kažkokystai elektro bytinis krapštukizmas. Neikyrus toks, su rytietiškais motyvais. Tokiu grupiu pasaulyje daug, mada joms užejo ar ka? Jei duotu paklausyti kur kitur tikrai iš mases neišskirciau. pernelyg tiesmukiškai laikomasi stiliaus. Ivertinimas 5/10. |
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