The ‘day’ is overcast. The CD casts a wide net, snaring a lot of facets of electronica...all coated in a thin veneer of melancholy; A lot of it also makes for very pretty listening.
‘Day’ skitters from My Computer style electronic-acoustic numbers (‘Schneider TM’ – ‘Reality Check’) Sparse Kraftwerk-cum-Faint judo chop disco (‘Data Rock’ – ‘I Used To Dance With My Daddy’) Gold Chains jittering hip hop (‘Pole’ - Arena) to the Creepy Creepy sound-vacuums Boards Of Canada like twist their beards in (‘Seefeel’ – ‘Time To Find Me’) Casio Jazz (‘Takagi Masakatsu’ – ‘Faustel’) and unsettling trip-hop-ish stuff (‘Strand’ – ‘Soy Petroleo, Soy La Muerte’): the low noise of a toxic black nightmare spilling out of your brain, spinning and nauseous with some kind of twisted Stephen Hawking voice-over slur about snakes, soaked in the sounds of rats and maggots squirming around in a rotting corpse.
A lot of it is quite beautiful.
‘Pulseprogramming’s ‘Off To Do Showery Snapshots’ is striking in its simplicity, letting a synthesiser fall gracefully down the scale, through whispered lyrics – Gone to the ocean, gone to the sea, gone to the shore line, gone to the anchor. I have no desire to know what that means; it’s simply wonderful.
‘Sage Francis’ – ‘Climb Tree’ is almost straight ahead hip-hop save for the pixelised starbursts raining down at the back of the mix. The lyric is thrashing around in a black sack of anger and sarcastic humour: ‘what you been up to?’ I don’t talk to freaks. I even ignore my neighbours who live down the stairs.
Ahh, the Spanish sun hangs low and bloated in the sky like a terrible blood orange. The day is late...a jug of frothy local beer, splash the sunburnt face in the hotel-room sink, change the shirt and then back to the festival. Your friends are all in Aiya Nappa. This is the sacrifice you have made for your passion. Now onward, noble outcast: Sonar by Night looms nigh. Huzzah!
As you would probably guess, Sonar by ‘Night’ is a much heavier affair. Just as well you went back to the hotel room for a bit, then. The CD twists its dirty tentacles around Electro disco noise from dudes like ‘Black Strobe’, smooth synth liquid house by Laurent Garnier and various cut and paste brick-in-the-face booms by guys like T. Raumschmiere – one of the most brutal sounding names ever. His track – ‘Nietenbolzen’- is heavy in the extremes and armed to its rotten fangs with lump hammers and shurikens. Plus Underworld kick it all off with ‘Twist’ – a carnival house thump and a bit of glitz. There’s a lot here, you can dance to it, and when you turn it up loud the bass shakes the rot out of the floorboards.
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A couple of the best ones: ‘Tied Up’ by ‘LFO’ plays like a demented game of Gran Turismo, high speed bolts of pain through the temples then machetes dragged across granite before the earths core implodes and savage beats pound the brain ahead of a slobbering lunatic who hijacks it all with an electric violin. It’s wonderful.
The 7-minute mutant ‘Paranoid Dancer’ by ‘Johannes Heil’ drags its mutilated face into view at the end of the disc and does exactly what its name implies. Its hard and horrific, a high pitch ringing screams across massive chunks of the song like rusted barb wire, shot through with laughing goblins, twisted beyond recognition by whatever evil machine churned this thing out. Things get really ugly around the 5-minute mark when the electronic vocal sample breaks down in a terrifying, gut-ripping moan, gargling like some ungodly beast scrapped of the underbelly of the inner circle of hell. Not something to play loud in an empty, dark house.
Sonar by ‘Day’ and ‘Night’ is an ace compilation of what sounds like an ace festival and the best thing about it is that none of it ever strays anywhere near the heathen territory of those ghastly ‘Ibiza chill out’ CDs, its too diverse intelligent for that, and simply too good. Not a William Orbit remix in sight. I wouldn’t go as far as to dust off the ‘something for everyone’ cliché. If your eyeballs shrivel up at the mention of ‘electronic culture’, as the Sonar press release calls it, then your not gonna be digging much here. But if you do, and if flights to Barcelona are thin on the ground round your way, then I highly recommend this.
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