Sometimes when we bring you bands, we vaguely try and connect them. Most of the time it doesn’t work and we look like fools, but this week there is a slight difference!
Only last week we brought you the brutal sounds of Canadian noise maker Venetian Snares – you'll remember we were envious of his surname as it has to be one of the coolest in the world: Aaron Funk. All you single women should throw yourselves at him to get such a credible new last name. Anyway, continuing the theme of almost specialist music, we travel all back across the Atlantic to introduce you to one of England’s premier electronic producers. The sounds knocked out by Dressed In Wires range from ambient to white noise to electronic tomfoolery and gabba, Shit down on us!
We really are spoiling you rotten this week with our artist in question. Most of the time we only give you links to bands and artists who have three or four tracks to listen to on their MySpace page. And none to download. All four tracks on the Dressed In Wires MySpace page are yours to download and immediately shove onto your MP3 player. But it gets better! Not only are you getting four quality tracks of various styles of electronica, a special audio player has been slapped up as well for your pleasure. On this player are another twenty different songs.
While they aren’t the full article, the sample does give a good feel of how the track generally feels and sounds. We’ll leave these sample tracks for you to explore. All we’ll say is that some of them are very interesting indeed and will hopefully convince you that all the Europop muck in the charts like Cascada should be taken to a mass burial site and set alight.
But back to the main body of the music. Now, usually when an artist is reviewed, the tracks in question usually form a kind of homogeneous blob. However, with Dressed In Wires, each track is totally different from the previous one. Is it a bad thing? In theory you could argue yes and no. On the plus side, it shows that the creator of all this madness can alter his style to cater for various audiences. How many times has a band gone stale because all they do is shit out the same pappy songs with no new imagination? However, the pissy moaners out there will argue that it’s hard to tell what someone sounds like if they constantly evolve their sound. Personally, we feel they should all bugger off and stop complaining about every detail. Enjoy what has been severed up to you!
Seeing that each song is so different, a brief summary of each one should help you find the style that’s right for you. Knuckle Shampoo – taken from 2006’s Bu-Hu album: This can only be described as digital mayhem hip-hop for the new generation. While most commercial dance music features bimbo-looking whores singing about love and feelings and other stomach-churning bollocks, the lyrical content is more of an angrily-rapped rant. A cheesed-off female vocalist almost preaches about how Asian culture has been popularised by us, the western pig, and how shit that is. We like it even better because of its subtle dig at crap cloths designer Madonna. Go all you girls; make your stance about how men are utter wankers!
Next on the Dressed In Wires MySpace page comes LIES, ALL LIES. Assuming this would be an angry-sounding song based on its title is a grave misjudgement. Gone are all the drum machines and keyboards that your rock geek would assume all electronic music is made up of. A much calmer sounding track. More than likely because it gets a whole lot nastier…
Taken from the brilliantly-named Fishing Songs album, Whale Stomach is a track that is kind of hard to describe. Have you ever placed a microphone next to a speaker and heard lots of digital distortion and general noise? Well this track is pretty much that. A whole five minutes of white digital noise that could literally jump out the speakers and slap your ugly mug silly. Rather tame for a Dressed In Wires noise song, though. It can get much uglier.
Finally comes a track which pulls together elements of the previous three. Young Porkers, short for You Young Porkers Sat Before Me, Each One Of You Will Scream Your Lives Out At The Block Within A Year. Starting out with some rather rude language, the song quickly evolves in to a wall of fuzziness and noise before quickly changing in to a ear-shattering mix of drum and bass and gabba-style tones. Something your grandma would not approve of. Throughout the ten minute plus track, the music is constantly changing to keep you listening. Find out for yourselves to see how it’s done.
Live sets are never a pretty occasion either. Armed with a laptop and some computer hardware, gigs are often ended with the destruction of keyboards and other equipment. Unique ways of disposing with his gear involve smashing it off speakers, crushing it with chairs and hacking away at it with hammers or screwdrivers, often drenching the bemused crowd in a shower of keyboard keys. Not a conventional way of doing things, but just as entertaining.
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