Klaus Schulze & Pete Namlook featuring Bill Laswell - The Dark Side Of The Moog VII

Fax +49-69/450464/MIG: 1998/2016

This series resembles a ‘90s TV show more than I initially gave it credit for. The first few albums/seasons were the feeling-out process, launching with the premise, figuring out what makes the concept work, and hoping you find enough of an audience before getting canceled. Okay, I doubt Namlook would have pulled the plug on The Dark Side Of The Moog if sales were poor, the chance at collaborating with Klaus Schulze a passion project more than anything. Plus, given Fax +49-69/450464’s strict limitation of pressed copies, how could you determine popularity through sales anyway? By how fast they sell out? What they go for on the second-hand market? Incessant pleas from fans for more copies, just this one time, oh please!?

Back to the TV analogy. While The Dark Side Of The Moog had tweaked and refined some aspects of its concept for the first few seasons/albums, it wasn’t until its fourth that things coalesced into something truly distinct in of itself. The Schulze/Namlook tandem was finally working as a mutual work, with both participants accentuating each other’s strengths while helping hide their weaknesses. The loose, freeform approach to each album prior settled into a concrete core if not in vision, then at least in structure. And who can forget that brilliant bit of stunt-casting with legendary bassist Bill Laswell, adding a fresh dynamic to the established interplay between the two main stars.

As with most successful TV shows, we’re in the Golden Years of the series now, but almost uniformly it’s around Season 7 where we find the first flecks of froth in the inevitable backwash of creative success. The Dark Side Of The Moog VII has these hallmarks too. For sure it maintains what’s worked before with the same degree of polish and finesse, but a few cracks of staleness unfortunately crop up too. For one, at an even fifty minutes long, this is the shortest album in this series, period. Laswell’s input is almost completely moot by this point too. He still contributes to two of the six tracks, but beyond some dubby effects lurking in the mix of Part I and space drone in Part III, I don’t hear much of his distinct sonic ticks. I know these tracks are Pink Floyd puns, but Obscured By Klaus seems entirely apt in this outing.

Part I and II mix into one another, moving from Berlin-School ambient to electro. The album then radically changes tone with Part III, nineteen minutes of spacey ambient that moves into another round of spacey electro in Part IV. I’d like this more if one of the synth solos wasn’t among the lamest I’ve ever heard (even from trance camps!). The final two parts, at nearly twelve minutes total, mostly shows off Schulze’s modern classical chops, again fine but nothing we haven’t heard before - which I can say for this album in general too. It’s little surprise only one piece was tapped from here for that Evolution retrospective of the series.

Klaus Schulze & Pete Namlook featuring Bill Laswell - The Dark Side Of The Moog VI

Fax +49-69/450464/MIG: 1997/2016

The Dark Side Of The Moog has seen many ideas for its cover art, details of which I’ve included in the hover text in the image for each review (you… did know you could hover text all this time, right?). Let’s delve into this one a little further though. No, it’s not because I need to burn self-imposed word count after six albums of Schulze-n-Namlook sessions. This is important!

So, this is the CD cover art that comes within MIG’s reissue box sets. They’re all essentially identical, but for the fact Earth inches further down the image with each album. For instance, it started beside Klaus’ name with the first CD, is at about the mid-point here in the middle-albums, and will lay near the bottom by the final CD. A cute enough premise, but it wrecks all sorts of logic if you understand orbital mechanics.

Look at the illuminated sides of the moon and Earth – north to south, right? Thus, from this particular perspective, the solar orbital ecliptic is a horizontal line in the middle of the picture. As Luna’s circling dance with us also remains on the plane of the ecliptic, that would mean Earth should, in fact, be moving right to left in each subsequent CD, not north to south. How did the art design screw this up so bad? Like, they got the orbital mechanics correct with the box set’s main art, so they can’t be ignorant of such a fundamental property of space physics. Did they imagine Earth to have undergone a cataclysmic change of its axial rotation, flipping it by ninety degrees like Uranus? That would allow for a ‘north-south’ motion of Earth from the moon’s perspective with its side illuminated as such, but then where’s the debris field of such an event? Where’s the debris field?

Sorry, but if RedLetterMedia has taught me anything, it’s that there’s humor in nitpicking micro-minutia. Fun times!

Anyhow, Dark Side Of The Moog VI brings us The Final DAT, giving me pause whether Schulze and Namlook were thinking this might finally end their frequent collaborations. Nah, I doubt it, the two still finding new ways of tinkering with their formula even at this late stage. Well, ‘late’ being relative, the project only three years removed from its initial conception. Plenty o’ fire left to burn, especially with these two incessant music makers involved (Laswell too).

The Final DAT has a mish-mash of individual tracks, very long compositions, and pieces extending through different Parts. Part V is the lengthiest at over twenty-four minutes, and is all kinds of space-synthy awesome while at it. Part II and III goes from grand cosmic beat (like, world beat, only… cosmic) into brisk space-synth of its own – oh, and neither III or V feature standard kicks either. Crafty. Part IV with Laswell does have soft, minimalist techno going on, but adds a de-e-e-ep sub-bass line to the trip. Wait, is this proto-microfunk? No, wait, there’s electric guitar jamming too. Never mind.

Klaus Schulze & Pete Namlook featuring Bill Laswell - The Dark Side Of The Moog V

Fax +49-69/450464/MIG: 1996/2016

One box set down, one to go. Sorry, fans of Dark Side Of The Moog IX-XI, but I ain’t springing for the third volume of this reissue series just yet. Getting the first two was pricey enough, and if television rules apply to music, then anything past Season 8 is guaranteed Zombie Years. Concept worn dry, sprinkled with gimmicks in futile hopes of spicing up the stagnation, not to mention a Sweeps Baiting surprise wedding for one of the more popular ‘ships on the series. Mind, I’m almost certain Bill Laswell never hooked up with Schulze or Namlook in such a manner, not even in some weird subset of synth fanfiction. (please don’t tell me Rule 34 has produced such a thing…)

Actually, Laswell’s contributions to Dark Side Of The Moog were on the wane by this point, offering his input on just two tracks for session number V (aka: Psychedelic Brunch). We’re also further from the ‘single song’ concept the project started out with, this album the trackiest of the lot yet. Whereas prior CDs had a sense of continuous themes explored throughout, segueing into each part as it played out, this one has distinct tracks from one another, no ideas carried over or re-explored elsewhere in the album. Perhaps the closest we get is Part III and Part VIII, though almost entirely due to them using similar, stuttery downbeat rhythms between them. At first I thought these were the two cuts Laswell had a hand in, as he is the most rhythmically minded of the three, but nay, only Part III is where he crops up, plus droning dark ambient piece Part VII, sounding rather similar to his work as Divination at that. Also, but damn, Parts III and VIII has a lot in common with the sort of psy-chill I’ve heard coming from the Ultimae and Altar ranks over the years – talk about your ‘ahead of its time’ narratives, but then that’s long been the talking point regarding Berlin School synth work anyway.

If there is any sort of unifying theme to Psychedelic Brunch, it’s in letting the individual aspects of the players involved strut their stuff. Schulze’s use of traditional synths in a classical sense (re: Berlin-School) prominently feature in Part II, IV and VI. Meanwhile, Part V, the centerpiece of this album at over sixteen minutes of length, plays to Namlook’s meditative approach to ‘90s ambient music, the sort of stuff likely heard in chill-rooms rather than art-houses. And heck, even the inventor of the Moog, Robert Moog, shows up, in an introductory bit of dialog. He also shills his email for some reason, though considering this was 1996, maybe they thought doing so added to the futurism of the project? Wait, wasn’t ‘retro-futurism’ the whole point in the first place, bridging the generation gap while taking the ‘70s and ‘90s into an undiscovered country? Where can Dark Side Of The Moog even go now? Man, all this projected crisis of faith over an email.

ACE TRACKS: September 2016

While putting together this playlist, I was struck dumb with a peculiar feeling of time displacement. Like, I know it’s only been a month since I wrapped up the ‘T’s with Twoism and Twentythree, but it feels like such a lifetime ago. I seldom get that sense when doing monthly musical recaps, the albums from the first days of a month almost as fresh on my mind as those from the last. It doesn’t seem like I’ve made a ton of progress through my massive alphabetical backlog either, only halfway through this Dark Side Of The Moog trek. Yet I take a tally, and I’ve gone through nineteen albums already. Man, I’m gonna’ be at this backlog until the end of the year, aren’t I? Poor ‘U’s, waiting forever for their time to shine (shut-up, ‘V’s, no one cares about you; ‘W’ be cool tho’).

I’m trying to figure out what’s caused this discrepancy within my chronometer, how it feels as though extra time was added to this month of September. That whole ‘changing of the seasons’ thing may have something to do with it, weather going from balmy summer to crisp autumn creating a sense of temporal extension. Didn’t have that prior years though. There was a week-long ‘stay-cation’ in the middle of the month for yours truly, with more free time to do non-routine things that might have fabricated a feeling of accomplishing more than I actually did. Can’t really say consuming the near-entirty of the Post Atomic Horror Podcast backlog in my downtime is actually an accomplishment though (still, much entertainment was had!). It’s that darn American election, isn’t it, dragging on and on and on, taking the world along with it. Such a clickbaity, time-sink of an election, folks. Here, have some ACE TRACKS from the past month to ignore it for a while.


Full Track List here.


MISSING ALBUMS:
Various - Artificial Afterlife Compilation
Bill Laswell - Axiom Ambient: Lost In Translation
Neil Young - Blue Note Café

Percentage Of Hip-Hop: 2%
Percentage Of Rock: 2% (would be more if those Neil Young songs weren’t mostly blues – it’s different!)
Most “WTF?” Track: Anything from Jlin, depending on how prepared you are for this forward-thinking music of the FUUUTTUURREE!

Wee, reverse alphabetical order! Been a while since I did one of those. Music’s a fairly standard mix of the sort you’ve likely come to expect being covered from this blog now. Lots of ambient, dark ambient, dub, techno, and chill, with splashes of house, trance, synth-pop, hip-hop, rock, and whatever it is you want to call Jlin’s work. It’s a solid assortment of tunes, though spoilers, next month’s will feature some surprising doozies.

Klaus Schulze & Pete Namlook featuring Bill Laswell - The Evolution Of The Dark Side Of The Moog

Ambient World/MIG: 2002/2016

I wasn’t considering detailing the bonus discs of these Dark Side Of The Moog box sets. True, I’ve a commitment to reviewing Every.Single. CD. of my music collection, but I’ve fudged things here and there. Most double-disc entries receive a lone write-up from yours truly, and even 3CD sets are sometimes reduced to a singular offering of my self-imposed word count (sorry, Trade: Past-Present-Future; not-sorry, This Is… Techno). What harm is there in quickly glossing over redundant features, of which I’m almost certain these bonus discs are. What does Vol. 1 of this bundle include anyhow?

The Evolution Of The Dark Side Of The Moog, eh. Huh, it’s got completely different cover art from all the stock ones used for the other CDs. It also apparently contains tracks from each of the first eight editions of the series (or ‘excerpts’ in the case of Wish You Were There and A Saucerful Of Ambience, since those two weren’t indexed as typical albums). I guess this would serve as a handy hour-long summation of Namlook’s work with Schulze, picking out the highlights, or at least the best musical representation of the project. Why stop at Dark Side Of The Moog VIII though, when the series made it all the way to XI? There’s more than meets the eye with this CD, and I must find out. I must!

*clickity-clickty clack; searching Lord Discogs ain’t wack*

Well I’ll be darned. The Evolution Of The Dark Side Of The Moog was indeed a separate release, put out on Fax +49-69/450464 reissue sublabel Ambient World. And as it came out in 2002, there was only eight volumes of Dark Side Of The Moog available anyway. This… also means that I now must review this CD as its own entity, but out of alphabetical order since it’s contained within this first box set. My OCD is sending conflicting demands.

Charmingly, it opens with a bit of dialog from Robert Moog himself, offering an introduction to The Dark Side Of The Moog, plus his email address or some reason. This was used in the fifth album of the series, and has now thusly ruined the surprise for the next review. Thanks, MIG!

Only a three minute synthy piece from Wish You Were There makes the cut for this Dark Side Of The Moog mega-showcase, but A Saucerful Of Secrets gets a whopping fifteen minutes plucked from its lengthy runtime. Fortunately, it’s the best fifteen minutes of that session, starting with energetic techno before heading into another synth solo from Schulze. Part III and Part IV of Phantom Heart Brother shows up, and if you can’t remember which those were, um… it’s the electro piece, and the synth heavy techno piece. Three Pipers At The Gates Of Dawn features Part VII and VIII, a short drone portion followed by another techno work with Laswell Bass (Ace Track, remember?). And as for the remaining tracks, I’ll tackle them when I come to them properly. Y’know, spoilers and all.

Klaus Schulze & Pete Namlook featuring Bill Laswell - The Dark Side Of The Moog IV

Fax +49-69/450464/MIG: 1996/2016

Mr. Kuhlmann worked with dozens of musicians in his time, but only a few did he continuously pair up with. Naturally Klaus Schulze is one such individual, otherwise we wouldn’t be diving into a twelve volume series called The Dark Side Of The Moog right now. Move D. (David Moufang) was another one, though the bulk of their collaborations took place in the new millennium. Then there’s Bill Laswell, who’s worked with so many musicians (just, so many…), a couple sessions with The Namlookian One was a no-brainer. I’ve already talked about their Psychonavigation work, and between that and their Outland side-project, they racked up eleven albums total, most produced before the year 2000. Seems natural then, that Mr. Laswell would get himself in on those Dark Side Of The Moog sessions while hanging out at Namlook’s studio. Why absolutely these modern Berlin-School works could use some heavy dub bass action. It’s, like, old-school meets new-school, with a dash of middle-school thrown in! Yeah, I know, Laswell’s more known for his ‘90s work than ‘80s material (including the project Material), but that darn tagline got stuck in my head, and damned if I don’t get it out!

Having ol’ Bill onboard makes for a radically different album in the Dark Side Of The Moog canon, with less adherence to Schulze’s approach to music craft. In fact, this album is remarkably uptempo considering the players involved – even Namlook’s take on trance was slowly on the wane by ’96. For sure Three Pipers At The Gates of Dawn (Part I) has the hallmarks of a typical Dark Side Of The Moog outing, with minimalist sounds and effects floating about. Yet there’s also a sense of urgency too, building synth strings and intermittent sci-fi noises escalating the piece’s tension.

By the time the brisk pace of Part II drops, it all feels worth the wait, a right hum-dinger of a… trance track? No, it’s not really that. For starters, it’s nearly twenty-two minutes long, and most trance just don’t do that (unless you’re Oliver Lieb). Secondly, while it has the mini-arp bassline and high-bpm, the actual kick is quite soft, leading to a rather tame rhythm section in service of the synth and dub action going on throughout. And it seems each contributor to this piece has their own moment to shine, whether it’s Namlook doing his sci-fi effects thing, Schulze doing his synth solo thing (a charming, whistling number), or Laswell adding extra *oomph* to the bottom end without ever overshadowing the others.

Part II really is the main talking point on here, but here’s a few additional notes. Most of the remaining tracks (nine in total) are brief, droney, experimental pieces, few breaching three minutes in length. Part V does a little techno for its short running time, and hey, Laswell’s bass! Part VIII explores the idea more, over eight minutes worth. It’s cool, but nothing we haven’t heard from the players involved before. Man, that Part II tho’… hoo!

Klaus Schulze & Pete Namlook - The Dark Side Of The Moog III

Fax +49-69/450464/MIG: 1995/2016

Wait a minute! How are we even getting these Dark Side Of The Moog reissues in the first place? The status of Pete Namlook’s label remains in limbo, so many ancient artifacts from the Fax +49-69/450464 archives long out of print. Even Ambient World, a sublabel specifically set-up for reissues of popular Fax+ releases, couldn’t keep their stock in for long, and they reissued Mr. Kuhlmann’s collaborations with Klaus Schulze twice! You might even still find some floating around, though not at any decent price. And as both prints closed shop after Namlook’s untimely death, everything from the Fax+ archives seems sealed away until the estate sorts things out with their respective owners. It’s not like all those original contributors to Fax+ can come knocking for their music back, can they?

Apparently so, though it’s not surprising that someone who’s been in the business as long as Schulze would have equal share in the Dark Side Of The Moog albums. And it just so happens ol’ Klaus has a reissue deal with MIG (Made In Germany Music), a relatively new print that deals almost exclusively with reissues. After perusing their wares, it seems the name’s a misnomer, with plenty American, UK, and other European groups getting attention from MIG, though I’m hard pressed to recognize much of them. Ian Hunter, Weather Report, Stray Cats… but yeah, there’s definitely a skewing towards German krautrock here, what with bands like Novalis, Epitaph, and of course Mr. Schulze himself making up the bulk. And if MIG is in the process of making all of Klaus’ music available again in the modern era, it’s only proper that the Dark Side Of The Moog sessions should receive the same treatment.

The Dark Side Of The Moog III marked a change in how Namlook and Schulze approached the project: each segment is are now indexed normally! Yep, no more five-minute Parts, where differing pieces bleed into each other and the like. Naturally that defeats the notion of playing these as a single composition of music, but even here the duo are showing signs of growing bored of that angle. Whereas Wish You Were There and A Saucerful Of Ambience generally flowed from beginning to end, each Part of Phantom Heart Brother is clearly different from what came before. Part 1 lasts over eighteen minutes, mostly consisting of corny ‘spo-O-o-O-ky’ modulating synth sounds, and entirely skippable. Part 2 keeps those sounds going for a lengthy fade-out, but vintage Berlin-School synths coupled with spacey guitar drastically changes the album’s tone. Following that, Part 3 abandons ‘70s sounds altogether, going for minimalist abstract electro as a ten-minute lead into the requisite trance cut in Part 4, and not a half-bad offering at that. Finally, Part 5 goes pure ambient, though in that distinct spacey Fax+ style Namlook made his own, before a little kraut guitar action is added to the mix. This is undoubtedly what everyone figured a Schulze-Namlook pairing would produce. We’re finding a groove now, friends.

Klaus Schulze & Pete Namlook - The Dark Side Of The Moog II

Fax +49-69/450464/MIG: 1995/2016

Make no mistake: Klaus Schulze and Pete Namlook roamed drastically different orbits in the early ‘90s, in no small part from being of two different generations of synth music. One was studious, old-school, and strictly for the art houses, consumed by egg-heads of electronic music. The other had his finger on the pulse of clubland, offering up energetic dance beats alongside his calmer, spacier moments enjoyed by knackered punters. Most attempts at melding the disparate scenes were met with indifference at best, failure at worst. And while I’ve no doubt Namlook took some inspiration from Schulze’s work, plenty other Berlin-School pioneers were still active should he have gained the courage to contact any of them. But why would any of them bother with some ‘rave’ guy in the first place?

Turns out ol’ Klaus did, detecting kinship with Mr. Kuhlmann after hearing his work on the second Air album. How the aged German came into contact with the younger German’s work was almost incidental, a brief meeting from a mutual associate, and somehow from that Schulze took in enough of a sampling of Namlook’s work to request an exchange of ideas, if not a full-on collaboration. Remarkable, considering Klaus was notorious for keeping his synth work a pure expression of his own muse with little outside input. It led to many stunning works, true, but also a fair bit of unfiltered waffle too. Hey, sounds like the bulk of Namlook’s discography as well! Clearly, a match made in stars of heaven.

The Dark Side Of The Moog II picks up where the first left off, expanding on the single-track concept with Schulze’s sounds leading for much of the proceedings. As before, the album is indexed with five minute parts, expanded by two additional tracks as we have ten extra minutes in this piece (A Saucerful Of Ambience). Again, these aren’t demarcations for any particular transition within this sixty-minute long composition, which is just as well because this is one tedious, meandering sixty-minute long composition.

The first twenty minutes is all sound-effects and field recordings, dominated by twitchy mechanical crickets, and intermittently pierced by distant gongs. It paints an outwordly vista, some landscape at the edge of an alien forest, but man does it ever go on and on. Around Part V, sci-fi pings, bleeps, and paarps provide an interlude of sorts, and then it’s back to sound effects for a bit longer (yay running waters). Finally, some half-hour in, we get actual melody, a rather typical offering of Berlin-School synth noodling, but such a welcome respite after so much abstract dithering. Namlook’s ear for trance takes a turn around Part IX, but it doesn’t last long, and we’re back to grand synth solos and field recordings for the final sixteen minutes.

Apparently both Schulze and Namlook didn’t want these efforts to sound too ‘70s, but A Saucerful Of Ambience is about as old-school as these Dark Side Of The Moogs go. They’re still getting a handle on this, methinks.

Klaus Schulze & Pete Namlook - The Dark Side Of The Moog

Fax +49-69/450464/MIG: 1994/2016

Gathering up the many, many, many volumes of Pete Namlook and Klaus Schulze’s epic collaboration series The Dark Side Of The Moog was never much of a priority. For sure if I saw one on the cheap, I’d snatch that sucker up, but odds of that happening with any release from Fax +49-69/450464 or its reissue sub-label Ambient World are absurdly low. On the other hand, a spiffy box set that does all that grueling work for me? Well shit, son, sign me up for that! And it’s what MIG done did, releasing all eleven volumes of The Dark Side Of The Moog in three bundles, plus a few bonuses for good measure. Though I remained blasé about the concept of Old Berlin-School teaming up with New Berlin-School, I’d be a fool to not spring for at least a couple of these boxes. Naturally, that now means I must review Every. Single. CD. Time for a serious knowledge drop in the project, then, but self-imposed word count runs short, so let’s get into The Dark Side Of The Moog, volume one. Eh? Of course the first wasn’t given a proper numerical demarcation. Like ol’ Pete and Klaus had any idea this would become such a long lasting thing.

If anything, Mr. Kuhlmann seems a little star-struck in his contributions for their initial session. He freely admitted as such, encouraging Mr. Schulze to do what he do best – coerce musical exotica out of crusty analog gear – and he’d work around that. This wasn’t so much about bringing one of the O.G.s of synth music into the hip ‘90s, but exploring what ‘70s music could do given two decades of technological advancements. This does lend to a rather freeform approach to songcraft, but that’s always been the Berlin School methodology regardless. If anything, it had lost its way as many synth wizards looked at making bank during the ‘80s once their sounds caught on with mainstream crowds. Those that didn’t adapt their craft to pop production or movie scores were left in relative obscurity, only later rediscovered by meticulous archivists of synthesizer chronology. Dear God, is this ever turning into a fancy-schmancy history lesson. Back to music.

The Dark Side Of The Moog (Da’ Kickoff) contains ten tracks, each titled Wish You Were There - yeah, the Pink Floyd puns can’t stop, won’t stop. And calling these individual pieces tracks is a misnomer, everything equally split five minutes apiece, save a whopping six minute finale. There are definite segments throughout, as Klaus moves through spacey kraut, sci-fi effects, and grand displays of modern classical synths, but none of the indexes mark any particular transition. About the mid-point, an electro beat emerges, leaves for some more experimental wibbling, and finally we’re treated to a little classic trance business. Not much, mind, but Namlook’s presence is definitely felt in this final stretch, whereas most of the preceding portions he sat back letting Schulze strut his stuff. They’d get better at blending their sounds.

Jlin - Dark Energy

Planet Mu: 2015

Dark Energy is the album every music journalist was anxiously waiting for, where they could finally show the world just how much they knew about the way-underground Chicago scene known as juke and footwork. For sure they had ample releases to draw from, but most of those were singles, compilations or mixes, items that just can’t fit in year-end Best Of articles, where the LP continues to dominate. No, they needed a proper album on the market to showcase all their knowledge of that particular scene, and Jlin’s debut was as good as any item for the task. I’ve barely come across a single review of Dark Energy that doesn’t start with a tedious, one-thousand word essay going on about footwork’s rise from Windy City obscurity to festival mainstage triumph, filled with tons of fancy, sophomore grammar and word salads describing the music. Dudes, it’s just fuckin’ dance music, with a sound palette no more intricate than ghetto-tech (sans the ass-n-titties) – stop over-analyzing this, especially something as primal and basic as juke.

Right, this style of music does have its complexity, in that its pure function is challenging groups of dancers in displaying their fancy footwork. And it seems music journos latched onto Dark Energy so syrupy because Jlin took the genre a bit further than that. A track like opener Black Ballet shows melodic touches with piano pieces, orchestral stabs, and chopped choir vocal complementing the rattling hi-hats, crisp snares, and thick bass – y’know, sophisticated stuff. Elsewhere, Unknown Tongues comes off like a screwy bhangra cut, Guantanamo has something of a message within its vocal samples (if you squint hard enough), while Ra almost contains a hook with its chippy manipulation of that particular word.

In fact, there’s a lot of chippy production on this album, which in of itself is part of footwork’s appeal as a dancefloor tool; challenging jukes and breakers with spastic bursts of snares, claps, and bass energy, making use of unconventional time-signatures, and such. Infrared, with its sharp synths and Mortal Kombat samples, has b-boy showdowns square in its sights. Black Diamond hits with that conga fury, and Abnormal Restriction literally takes the ‘screw’ idea of ‘chop-n-screw’ with abrasive mechanical whirring.

That all said, Jlin’s debut does get tiresome after a while. Eleven tracks that generally consists of *chik-chiki-chk clap, boom-boom-boom CLAP*, with little variation in drum kit sounds, begins showing the limitations of this genre. And while Dark Energy does show more dynamism than other rhythm-heavy ghetto tracks of scenes past, this is hardly the ‘music of the F-U-T-U-R-E’ many highfalutin critics purport it as. Yeah, Kanye will undoubtedly soon sample it, though more to prove he still knows the pulse of Chicago streets, yo’ – dude would sample gabber if he felt it’d improve his production rep. Still, if you’ve been on the fence about footwork, Dark Energy’s a decent entry point into the scene– like, anything Planet Mu has no problem promoting can’t be all bad, can it?