Thursday 5 August 2010

Ikonika - Contact, Want, Love, Have

I am just getting heavily into Ikonika's  Contact, Want, Love, Have album now. It's so busy with ideas and a complete lack of seriousness but at the same time it just blows away loads of nerdy versions of the same kind of stuff, shifting chiptune (if not the actual genre then at least, 8-bit nostalgia) into a dubstep environment in a more sophisticated way than similar artists like Quarta330 who seem to just drive the plasticky sound hard without tricking it out with the kind of depth of structure or tone that is on this record. Herein lies a wealth of polyrhythms, melodic counterpoint and samples - the Streets of Rage owned R.E.S.O.L.; the amphetamine pulse rush of  They Are Losing The War; the pixellated airehorns pushing the warehouse jump up of Sahara Michael; all utter genius - almost timeless in the way they straddle generationakl eras of technology.  I was a bit skeptical when someone in The Wire included Joy Orbison under the Hypnagogic umbrella, but listing to this album that makes more sense - the timelessness here is the refraction of the Megadrive/SNES sounds through all the dance musics of the last 10 years and pushed through a future/modern filter, thus creating that distorted sense of a past imagined a discombobulated, recency-influenced rememberance, the essence of hypnogogia.

So yeah, I am well into this record, and for the now this is my favourite track by far:

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