Vinyl and Digital Reviews: Various Artists - Landscapes Of The Future (Greener Records)

Greener Records was created to bring together founder Andrés Zacco’s fellow Argentinian artists who share the same vision in techno. This compilation is a new direction however, for armchair listening and musing, so disband your hopes for techno drumming before playing. As the title suggests, there’s something of a soundscape approach with an eye on the future, and soundscapes have certainly been a big feature of the dance industry in the last year (such as the recent debut LP of Stroboscopic Artefact’s Lucy) and whether this actually follows or precedes a resurgence of popularity for ambient drone works amongst fans is still undecided. There does seem to be a trend in producing singles and EPs for the dancefloor, and reserving LPs for more esoteric or ‘mindful’ works, however.

Opening with Gustavo Lamas’ (Kompakt / Traum) ‘Mas’, you’re taken to a crackly soundscape, reminiscent of a soundtrack used to accompany flashbacks, and quietly fizz into Zacco’s ‘Landing’, which is meant to depict the journey of a safety capsule in space. The theme of deep washes of sound and wind prevail, and make use of natural sounds freed of a rhythm. Sandoval adopts the sounds of the forest for ambient with strong similarities to meditation music for ‘Estacion Nunez’, but there is a sense of techno being held in a darkened room somewhere asking to come back and join the fray. Nico Purman (Vakant) is perhaps the most recognisable name on the compilation, and ‘Mauer Park’ manages to inject melody and ergo, a sense of rhythm without letting the team down on their soundscape aims. He uses field recordings to help capture his vision and it comes off as one of the more coherent tracks of the LP. The compilation is named for Franco Cinelli’s bubbling and bell-jingling ‘Landscapes Of The Future’, and it provokes a deeper thought in me; suggesting that we are living in our own self-awareness, picking out sounds that have been captured in thousands of different ways and repackaging them for new ears, and I'm specifically talking about the cult of Bladerunner. There is getting to be little distinction between film scores and ambient works coming out of the techno scene and it’s this haziness which sometimes left me wondering whether there were missing visuals to complete the experience of the ‘Landscapes...’ compilation.

Regardless, and moving on to the only non-Argentinian on the release and another highlight, Poland’s Jacek Sienkiewicz and ‘Frk’, capturing the sense of working in an aircraft hangar: dwarfed by overhanging feats of engineering and overcome by engine drones. Jonas Kopp’s ‘Cloned Krishna’ is touted as a “ toxic walk through a bioroid production factory”, and we are again brought back to Bladerunner, a bioroid being a manga term for synthetic organisms or bio-robots. The track itself comes across as a lo-fi and echoing drone of oriental music in a 1940s film, however - slightly cliched, with a touch of witch house. Jeremy Flagelo emphasises the use of hardware to create music with a track composed with an ARP Odyssey MK3, which may work as a promotional tool, but as an experimental soundscape it holds a strong similarity with a school hearing test. The 9 track LP is rounded off with veteran Leonel Castillo’s ‘Doming Soleado’ which acts as a complete departure from the rest of the sounds. Imagine finding a degraded recording of Four Tet-ish dancehall in 2060 and carefully reconstructing on a now outmoded machine, and you have the strangely pleasing and upbeat ‘Doming’.

Release Date. February 28th 2011


Releases available: Nico Purman - Visions Ep (April 12, 2011)

Genre deconstruction: Witch House Pt 1

First rumblings about the ‘witch house’ genre began spreading on the internet just before Summer 2010 and had finally filtered through to mainstream media such as The Guardian by August. Before it’s even fully taken off, the internet naysayers and musos have begun to rubbish the genre as nonsense and already subverted by advances / devolutions in already established fields.

It’s been listed as goth, library music, drone, doom ambient, ghost trance, glo-fi, post-punk, hauntology, ghost drone, spectral pop, drag, were house, haunted house, and an extension of chill-wave: either way it appears the leaders of the genre-coining movement, or the bands themselves, have been channelling Nathan Barley for inspiration.

It could also be considered Facebook or Myspace music; a genre growing from disparate groups of people who never meet but produce and share ghostly influenced music - like electro-pop in a morphine slurry. First glances show a collective of young artists, and I suspect so young that the full extent of the 80s and 90s music scenes have bypassed them in a rather concrete way. The term ‘drag’ is supposed to reference a Houston sound perpetuated in the 90s by DJ Screw and similar crews: the major addition to their sluggish music was the strong influence of cough-syrup codeine and fizzy juice known as purple drank - it frequently led to deaths, including DJ Screw at the age of 29, who turned down record deals to remain with his purple drank crew.

The music, his crew and codeine came first, and he remained in his working-class lifestyle downing syrup mixed with Sprite until his death. Drug abuse was experienced as culture, and the culture drove on the music - a move away into the shiny world of record deals could have signed the death knell for purple drank beats, and they remained true to their addiction and music vision.


The witch house band Salem jumped on DJ Screw’s legacy and kept the chopped-up, sluggish and ethereal quality while working in synths and vocals along a Boris Karloff theme. Other artists chuck in electro-rock, or dub, or ambient, but the genre seems entirely based on themes of the occult and the paranormal, albeit through a psychedelic aperture. A side-look at dubstep suggests the likes of Burial helped to add some ethereal inspiration to the genre. .

One of the labels behind the witch house sound is Tri Angle, founded by Robin Carolan. He has been quoted as saying: “Hip-hop and rnb, in essence, is a commercial kind of music. But when you get down to the nitty gritty of it, it’s sonically at least really strange music. And there’s so much you can do with that. I’m surprised it’s taken so long for it to start being experimented with by people who aren’t in that world.”

And for me, that’s the crux of it - “people who aren’t in that world”. Houston’s drag hip-hop / street-rap artists in the 90s ran a merry-go-round with codeine syrup abuse, plenty of whom didn’t survive their ‘muse’, and they were predominantly from poorer African-American backgrounds. Witch house or whatever you want to call it, comes from people who saw little of that era first hand simply due to age differences, and they come from markedly different backgrounds - in some way it reminds me of a marketing plan to extract a culture-specific genre/style and tweak it for the mass market. Strip off the syrup abuse, add in genres tapping a definite trend, and it is reborn with little contemplative thought for the founding fathers who did not survive long enough to see purple drank music without the purple drank aspect.

Tom Ewing of The Guardian disagrees, suggesting: “What witch house tells me is that genres now aren't exercises in innovation or marketing, so much as ways of framing an experience. And if you won't feel open to that experience, your investigation of it won't get far.”

So, underground trend marketing or framing an experience? Stay tuned to this blog for the second part in Witch House deconstruction, where we delve into the artists, their naming conventions and their different interpretations of the sound.