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STRATEGY

USA underground legend Strategy (Peak Oil, Idle Hands, Further, 100% Silk) returns with his 20th album that repurposes the chill-out subgenre to withstand the heat of armageddon.

On "The Wet Room", Cascadian experimental music fixture Strategy set out repurpose chill-out for improved resilience under the strains of record-breaking heatwaves. Syrupy bass workouts, generative freeform bubblers, captured freak transmissions, uneasy soundbites, buried secret messages, dubbed-out mixing board sessions coalesce into a purposeful, yet liquid, choreography. 

Fans of the West Mineral / Huerco / 3XL universe and some of the recent trip-hop inspired releases from last year should defo check!

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: Under the radar downbeat / dub engineer Strategy returns with another unfathomably deep exercise in echo chamber science and precision bass workouts. If you liked his "Dub Mind Paradigm", you're gonna love this.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Sun Comes Down
A2. Deadly Rainbow
A3. No Defects
A4. Mysteries Inside The Dogmind
A5. Heat
B1. Meanwhile Moon
B2. Ride Rite (Dub)
B3. Numeros
B4. Freshmosphere

After a triumphant slew of recent 12"s on 100% Silk, Endless Flight and Under the Spire, electronic music National Treasure, Strategy emerges from the fog swept enclaves of Portland with this, his dub kraut disco-not-disco masterpiece on new essential underground label Peak Oil. Strategy has managed to throw the totality of leftfield musical zeitgeist into his unparalleled musical juicer, resulting in a full length album of bass-heaving, post-punk-tinged pop. From the ramschackle atmospheric opener "Sugar Drop" to album highlight with "hit" writ large all over it, "Baby Fever" right through to sunset sludgy dub banger "Saturn's Day", Strategy has created something entirely his own.

Strategy

Future Rock

    Paul Dickow aka Strategy releases music on his Archigramophone imprint and curates monthly Community Library nights at the Dunes club in Portland, Oregon. Strategy has released dance singles (with Seattle's ORAC label), remixes and a debut album, "Strut", on the Portland-based Outward Music label in summer 2003. Strategy wires together Dickow's programming and performing experience via a hodgepodge of table top electronics, computers and realtime musicianship. Combining a granular ambient aesthetic with an abstract, percolating rhythmic sensibility, Strategy unites small parts into complete melodies motivated by complex pulsations. The Portland Mercury described Dickow as 'Portland's laptop prankster/meister of disquo'. To date you've heard Strategy dabble in everything from headphone-oriented ambient music to house and dub; this is the work that brings it all together.

    "Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)", Brian Eno's sophomore solo outing, is a grab bag of freaky, science-fiction-dipped confections. Filled with a battery of innovative, unsettling effects, the album is darker and more complex than "Here Come The Warm Jets". The artist shows an increasing willingness to experiment with texture, as on "The Great Pretender," whose whirling, oozing keyboard line and synthesized vocals approximate delirium tremens or a hatching hive of maggots, or on "Put A Straw Under Baby," which features the Portsmouth Sinfonia, whose members have no knowledge of their instruments.

    Yet Eno's grasp of melody and songcraft is everywhere: on the bouncing, absurdist / philosophical "Burning Airlines (Give You So Much More)," and on straight-out rockers, like the deliciously intense "Third Uncle" (which is propelled by the churning guitar of Roxy Music's Phil Manzenera, and is, arguably, the album's highlight). Concurrent with David Bowie's "Aladdin Sane"-era alien aesthetic, Eno's tunes are even more otherwordly and warped than his glam cohort, making use of the full palette of bizarro synthesizer effects and creepy-cheeky postures. The songs, however, are as inventive and appealing as their treatments, and make for Eno's most solid - and experimental - pop album. "Taking Tiger Mountain" holds up magnificently, even years on in the artist's brilliant career.



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