Holographic Memory 3 – Solstice

Opening track Free Motherfuckers from Deedrah has more ideas busting at its seams than I think I’ve heard from him in ages. Starting out funky, then picking up into a percussive and tecchy sound with a delicious low-set bassline, before picking up a very tasty set of melodies which ride it out to the end… an end which, unfortunately, comes a little too soon and poses a danger to confuse DJ’s the world over. Which is excellent, of course. Pixel & Cyclic’s Nuclear Device is nicely-produced, and much more restrained than you might expect. It’s all about the groove, which is baggy and easy-going, and it introduced new sounds to slide over the top neatly. Joti Sidhu’s Black Eyes is wonderful, picking up a sinister, blocky vibe and keeping the energy going right through. Wonderful stuff, and the production and final mastering adds a chunky sheen of quality to proceedings. Wrecked Machines’ Echo Groove sounds just like every other Wrecked Machines track, worthy of a listen only to verify the slide form decent music to this mindless pap, before you jump instead to Hujaboy’s Just A Freak, which is fuckin great. Yay. It bumbles along nicely, the sounds come alive brilliantly, the midbreak sample is deliciously cheeky, and it’s all pinned around this groove that’s a layer of immaculately-placed riffs and lines, all spaced perfectly to make a genius dancing plateau in the middle. Intelabeam’s Be Somebody has a harder edge that I would have expected, some of the sounds are almost borrowed from acid techno and the groove is much more four-to-the-floor-no-messin. It moves nicely enough and offers a good change from the general pace of today’s dancefloors. The Antidote & Dimitri’s Distortion is nice, though a far cry from the GBU stuff of a few years back. It uses (guess what) distorted sounds and peppers them over the gnarly backbone groove, working particularly well at the break. Psysex & Rocky’s Brenner Power is fairly uninteresting, moving in a very predictable way, the only point of note is that they thought to put some sort of filter thing on the guitar so it moves about a bit and sounds less like a guitar. Or something. Synthetic’s Space Is Da Place is an interesting one, it’s very low-slung and more like a funky disco tune played through some trippy effects. Which is no bad thing. It’s unlikely to get many dancefloors in a fever but there’s nice depth in this, with layers coming out from behind other layers, before disappearing. The bassline gets a bit annoying though, and it runs out of ideas at around the five minute mark, but fair go for getting a different sound in there. Finally Tristan’s Activate Yourself is a big disappointment form the big man, who’s capable of so much more than this. There’s barely a shred of his trademark Tristanism here, it’s much more like a standard trance-by-numbers effort and sounds unfinished. We’re looking, then, at a desperately average compilation, with most of the music being nondescript at best. A couple half-deliver, and only Just A Freak really pushes the boundaries out in the way that previous Holographic Memory albums did.