Baby Mammoth - One...Two...Freak (Pork)

If Baby Mammoth are one thing for sure - then they're prolific. Having signed to Pork in 1996, this is their third album - and second to be released this year! The duo of Mark Blissenden and Andrew Burdall have already cooked up phat beats, spun drum & bass off into new directions and got everyone thinking about what they're listening to. So what next?

Anything is possible. Each track here is a superbly polished example of it how dance music really can straddle both sitting down and standing up-type activities, if it's done right. Take track 3, 'Additive', for example. This has massive club potential. And at the same time would get your lounge jumpin' on a Monday night. Elsewhere there's 'Luna Park', an aptly titled sound-scape that pits soothing chorused guitar chords and harp-like synth pads against a scat industrial backbeat. This mixes into 'For Dear Life', which takes a club friendly almost-garage beat, soothing atmospheric washes and overlays a woman recounting an O.O.B.E, or out-of-body experience. A cathartic track if every there was one.

Other tracks continue the journey of drum & bass beats into vast oceans of relatively uncharted territory. How can drum beats be fast and furious, but soft and warm at the same time? Answer - Baby Mammoth pieces like 'Zen Butchers' and 'Sound in your Mouth'.

Baby Mammoth is the most apt name for this band; at the moment friendly, cute and compact, but inevitably destined to become ominously, overpoweringly huge. 7/10


This review also published in: DJ magazine

Y-Ton-G - Klangspiegel (Raum 312)

In the midnight hour in the sound laboratories of Hamburg, you'll hear the strains of Raum 312. Their fourth release is by Y-Ton-G, what seems to be a one-man performance art spectacle that takes natural found sounds and sources and pushes them through a production process in search of the next level of ambient music. How can you not be even slightly curious of an album that states on the cover: "The music on this CD is made with stones, metal and wood. When these natural materials are touched they begin to vibrate immediately."... And you know he's not joking when you hear the finished result. Even more so when - believe it or not - you begin to recognise the musical feel of the stone, metal and wood vibrations. Yes, this album could sound very familiar to anyone that's visited crypts, wandered cathedral cloisters or - I would imagine - pot-holed through vast underground lakes and caverns! Y-Ton-G takes the natural atmospherics of the very life around us and places them on disc in away that field recordings never could. But what has all this got to do with dance music? Or should I really have to ask and answer that question? Truth is, if it hadn't been for the acid/house explosion ten years ago and all the splintered art-forms that emerged thereafter, an album as innovative as this could probably never have been released. 7/10


This review also published in: DJ magazine