A Million Hz Away – 67 Records

There’s something very, very oldskool about this. Yer cover art. Yer track titles. And the sound. This album is awash with ideas, but the execution is lacking and, at times, graceless. The intro to Memory Moog is great: really drifty, quirky stuff that promises a lot. As soon as it drops however, there’s a big gap in the sound – the bottomend is almost off the radar. The sound is kind of old skool, particularly in the repetition of the samples, but this isn’t always a good thing: you’re left wondering exactly when this was recorded, and whether you just bought something from 1999. Imagic is just about the most horrendous vocal track I have ever heard. The backing is fairly pacey and tight trance, not bad in itself, but then there’s dreadful vocal over the top… it sounds like a bored Londoner doing a drunk depeche mode impression. The volume of the vocals drifts in and out, sounding sloppy, and there’s a sort of “challenging discord” about the layering of the music underneath.. a challenging discord that succeeds only in sounding absolutely bloody terrible: I am praying for Infected Mushroom. Prisma works better, it’s got a solid groove to it and the different layers sound a lot less forced, given more to breathe. The bass is still very hollow and cyclic, but this is clearly about the topends moving you somewhere. It’s nice. And if you put it up to +5.0%, it sounds like Chi-AD. 13 Years Later has a plastic kick, a bassline like something Goa Gill would play, very daft flute and pads that I’m sure I managed to find when messing around with Fruity Loops for two stoned hours last July. Hillbilly Abduction is an insanely superfluous break in proceedings, two guys in dodgy deep south accents talking about how nice someone’s “titties” are, before Roswell whacks in with all the subtlety of a bucket of chicken. It thunks and clunks, it has a generic sample about “ufo’s sighted over roswell”, an unfathomably shit blippy top line, and sounds that are escalating in such a way as to sound completely discordant, meaningless, and unfocussed. A dullifying breakdown later and we’re into the bastard son of The Nommos and Space Tribe, before it loses its way completely and forgets what it was supposed to be doing (and we assume it was one of the only people who knew in the first place). A Million Hz Away opens with some very nasty noises, and it’s more of the same. I really don’t want that to be the case, but it is. The most frustrating thing about this is that you can see that the ideas are there… they just get lost, buried. Avante Guardian, however, works. Almost. It’s dark, with a tasty mulchy mushroom megabass that works well. You can feel the energy getting more and more manic and then – yes, you guessed it – it goes discordant again. But hang on, because there’s some restraint here: it builds, peaks with live instruments chucked in for good measure, falls into a massive break, drops into something that sounds like Chakra & Edi Mis, and then thrashes the shit out of it. Pleiadian Agenda is a grungy, lo-fi doctor who theme takeoff, that uses bits and pieces of the original here and there. I love the idea here, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired. In the right hands, or in the right collaboration, this could be excellent. But this won’t move a dancefloor. By the time we’re onto Dogon Rotor, the point has been lost. Where were we again? It opens up nicely enough, but then a whole bunch of topend noises come in where one would have done. And I think maybe this is the problem with A Million Hz Away. The ideas are there: Mr Starseed is evidently an able producer, whose sonic tinkering is something he enjoys to the point of obsession. However invention needs to be anchored, and that’s something that’s just not here.