Time Out – Supportive Unbending Tunes vol 1

Various

Time Out – Supportive Unbending Tunes vol 1

Spontaneous Aerobics (Germany)

A tricky album this. Twelve tracks of vaguely-trancey jazzy dublike beats, the sort of thing that I guess used to be called Trip Hop, and with some new names alongside older ones. MIDA’s Dreamwave is wonderful, a sort of vaguely-glitchy electrodub breaks effort with nice sounds, crisp production and a wonderful groove that’s impossible to sit still to. Sediment 4’s Berlin Electronic Network is a corker, with sprinkles of psy-chill over an orgasmic summertime backing. Fucking great. Sungirl’s Sunshine is the first downtempo tune I’ve heard from her, and it’s moles away from her normal Russian-badtrip forest-chase stuff…. Deliriously laidback, Big Chill-friendly stuff with wah’ed guitars and chummy hip hop beats. Solar Gliders’ Indica is a perfectly competent piece of dubby trance, maybe with a few too many random notes in the lead line but with smooth and soaring acid making up for it. Wind Circle vs Alpha do nicely with Psylab, a very tasty dubby number with a central “fuck the regulations” sample which pretty much states this CD’s manifesto… A sort of Orb-y tune, the chord progressions are nice and the overall groove is pleasant and floaty. Mondero’s Eisenschaukel takes things a little louder, think heavy beats and deep sounds; Safran’s Do You Know has a sort of world-music-through-an-electro-blender quality to it; and Dr Resha’s Dubby Funk is exactly that, with live instruments and a proper organic feel making it sound more like a band you’d enjoy at a festival’s chillspace than a random electronic chillage outfit. Miditeranean’s Good Will is my new best friend, just such a nice track… at times sounding like something Roy Ayres might have recorded, it’s a (slightly too short) funk-jazz odyssey that wouldn’t be out of place in either a soft-porn flick or a post-blaxpliotation Detroit detective show. Nevertheless, its delicious music that sounds better the more sunshine you listen to it under, and its “live” sound makes it all the better. Gleam’s intriguingly-titled Texas Chainsaw Massacre In Dub floats along nicely, with a particularly nice groove at the bottom that balances well against sketchy noisey stuff over the top, and Lombogott Inc’s Touch rounds things off in a sort of fin-de-ciecle vocal way. There’s some great moments on here, but it’s not easy to see where they’ve pitched this – as a psychedelic chill album, it lacks flow and doesn’t stand up too well against some of the other contenders out there at the moment. As a dub album, it lacks a bit of punch and creativity. I guess it’s best viewed as a downtempo, leftfield collection and as such it’s pretty good… but whether there’s any lasting depth to this that will have you coming back months from now is another matter entirely.