The 2kDozen 500: #182 - Cabaret Voltaire, "1974-76"

Cabs have featured in the Peel Archive in a big way and the Irma Vep tracks I've been sent by Darren Parry at The Difference Engine on Mon FM are taking their time to arrive and be playable. So I'm listening to this because it promises to be fresh cream pulled from early mid-Seventies experiments in a time when Sheff City was a very difference place than it is now.

I suppose electronic music has changed massively since then. It's interesting (or maybe it isn't) how danceable patterns of the music came in and took control as if that's all music was ever any good for. As if that was the whole point of music. This album is not about dancing. I'm not sure what it's about. It's about weirdness, but I'm not sure what it's expressing.

Does it express the ideas that kick around inside a mind left on its own with some peculiar noises? Or in the case of the Cabs, two minds? "In Quest of the Unusual" in fact. When the machine makes the noise in an uncompromising way, and the person is expected to join the dots themselves, set the branches stirring out into the distance of their own imagination; is that what happened here? "Do The Snake" is a bit like a crazed version of a dance track ("Keep your ass up high/Well off the ground") with some percussion and a bit of bass; but it's jokey, boffiny business. Somehow we got from here to The Prodigy; from here to Pete Tong. Or maybe we didn't; maybe this was some Neanderthal version of dance music that was outbred by the "I Feel Love" strain. That probably was the right result.

"Venusian Animals" is a bit transparent as titles go. Setting a soundscape. There's a noise like oboes. And solar winds. Too much sci-fi, but then who else was going to make instruments from mail order kits in a time like the Seventies? And I suppose it describes strange, alien creatures - a paraphrase of the strange, alien noises they were making without a real guidebook. So I like it.

There's eight minutes of the "The Outer Limits" with a sound like a dematerialising TARDIS running through most of it. That and "She Loved You" are quite repetitive. Maybe this was the stage at which they were beginning to get the hang of what they were doing and started expressing themselves rather than interpreting the machines? It always gets boring and repetitive when you begin to get to grips with a new thing. And it's a sort of distended, distempered cover of The Beatles' "She Loves You" in a whispered mumble. The "yeah/yeah"s are especially cool.

Rating: Sci-Fi Adventures out of Mail Order Envelopes

The 2kDozen 500: #181 - C Cat Trance, "Khamu (She Sleeps Walks)

This from Rough Trade in 1985 and from the C section of the Peel Archive. Never heard of them before.

Open with a song partly in French, as the old showbizz greats used to say: "Puritaines" opens on an waspy high bassline, or a very low, throaty guitar line then sings about new Puritans and possibly something to do with television. Sax and guitar duet like angry swans fighting at Buckingham Palace. It has a limping drive that I don't think I've heard from anything recently. "Barefoot Doctor" is about "rattling ghosts" with some big festive-sounding cymbals and a feline bassline. I'm reminded of Japan. "The New Hassan" also drags itself though some slow, sour places - almost like a beatless version of Primal Scream's Jah Wobble mix of Higher Than The Sun with loads of really tense and tiny violins giving it some in a nearby echo chamber. Some big, weird, morbid parade has passed.

Vocals take a while to arrive on "(Screaming) To Be With You", skidding in on top of jittery and Arabic sounding tune. That Arabic image is copied on the hidden face on the cover as well. The lyrics slide past me in the sandstorm, except the title. "Rattling Ghosts" crashes in with some more Middle Eastern sounds, a bagpipe heard in market trading. "Simple Helen" moiders on about a butcher's daughter. There's a folk tale sense to the lyrics and I'm wondering if they're based on some Middle Eastern legends or somesuch. They have an imported feel, as though stories have been picked up wholesale without much lyrical input.

It ends with "Miss Manners" with spooky gaps and dramatic tension enough to give it a Death on the Nile feel. And with that, my casual racism draws to a close for another album. There's a feel of the coffee table and early world music exploration and dinner parties. Turns out they were from Nottingham.

Rating: Dinner Party out of Lawrence of Arabia

The 2kDozen 500: #180 - Motion Sickness of Time Travel, "Motion Sickness of Time Travel"

Oh, fuck; what am I doing? This is some seriously scary music with a quite scary title, the tracks are twenty minutes long and I feel like my immortal soul is under threat. I might not make it to the end.

"The Dream" is quite terrifying, not least because of a low, calm beep noise that keeps turning up. I fear that noise. It's used for something, but I don't know what - something involving film editing? A droning, Cold War, in-the-event-of-a-nuclear-attack beep; shit scary. And I'm only listening to it for the first time. Imagine spending hour after hour on your own in a dark basement with only the slowly building music for company, listening to it time and again until the thoughts move from the back of your mind to the corner of your eye. Yipes! There are human voices too - trapped in some wafer thin dimension where no-one can hear you clean. It ends with an echoey deep space laser battle.

A cheerier beginning to "The Center", the music talking quite happily to itself. And the voice sounds a little less trapped than on the first track; but it still doesn't sound like the kind of center I'd want to hang out in. The place sounds very haunted, by inventive and occasionally beautiful-sounding ghosts. I'm really not sure what to make of it. It sounds like it should be lovely, but I think I want a bit more drama or a bit more direction in the music. Eventually, about fifteen minutes in, the tune begins to move away from the centre and out into further reaches. I just want some propulsive bass to inspire me.

It gets a bit pan pipes on "Summer of the Cat's Eye", a bit Lord Summerisle. There's a pulse that shifts between a couple of frequencies to set some nerve or other on edge. Curious creepy music that I find myself associating with ancient BBC computers and sickness and time travel back to earlier sickness. The motion certainly seems quite lateral. I'm out of time and the fourth and final track will criminally go unexplored. A sneaky listen shows it building into a furious, howling Beelzebub of noises roughly halfway through with messed up piano sliding in and out. Too scared for that now.

Forgive me!

Rating: Threads out of Pulses

The 2kDozen 500: #179 - Datassette, "The Aviatrix EP"

Was pointed in this direction by Handsome Nick, who introduced me to a track from their 2006 album, "Can You Smell Maths?". That album wasn't available for my ears though, so I've moved to this EP from 2009.

Sounds like techno from the Jazz Age, the title track - there's some newsreel audio or radio recording about Amy Johnson. "Micro" sounds slick but slight, not much going on between its ears. Puts me in mind of Royksopp in places, contentedly rolling around the eardrums.

Ambition carries a bit more bite on the third track, "Humans"; it clatters and spreads and makes detailed little noises in a way you'd expect humans to do. Pesky little fleshy fucks! Around five minutes in, the Boards of Canada turns a bit more random and Aphex - usually a very welcome development and no different here. There's a kind of wiping, photocopier noise, which I'm ashamed to say I can't think of another way to describe.

Closer "Weather Conditions" has the same feel of arthritic electronic equipment, making backward-sounding whipping and whopping noises like on BoC tracks, coming to the end of its life, looking bad on a life well-lived, welling up with silicon tears. I like it. So an EP of two halves, I'd suggest.

Rating: Two out of Four

The 2kDozen 500: #178 - Karen Gwyer, "I've Been You Twice EP"

This was posted to me by @Yaaard of Yaaard industries yesterday with words about Boards of Canada and XX chromosomal patterns. I do not know of Karen, but I like what I now hear of her. I'm thinking more like early Aphex Twin, with big chunky, seaboard synth noises chiming and buzzing majestically about. It all sounds homemade, but the kind of home with a Hellraiser like dimension out the kitchen door full of amazing slow-moving electronic sounds.

Maybe the Aphex connection comes from her name sounding so Cornish, but she's actually from Michigan and lives in That There Fancy London. The album even comes up on my iTunes next to "I Care Because You Do". Inavoidable and unescapable.

"Shermer Shake" mixes the paradoxically sublime and pedestrian synth sounds with some distant vocal hush. "No Moondoggies for 3 Weeks" (Moondoggies?) is a little more crowded and percussed than the other tunes, but still managed some drifting wordless singalong from an airy loft of the imagination. There's a Bladerunner tranquility to "Infernal Selection Enceinte Version" that borders on the Clannad, far from any infernal imagery altogether. It seems that she is interested in the same space between and/or around folk music and electronics as Clannad were, if the attached video is anything to go by, covering the Folk Anthology. "Velvet Gambit" closes with almost absent-minded humming over a churchy chord progression that dangles in that part of the brain from where The Orb rules the Ultraworld with pulsating bass.

The EP is also on a C30 tape, which maintains a link with ferric oxide that I've always been a little sad to miss. Yaaard too is a fan of the cassette, releasing some of his own sweet sounds on similar plastic contraptions. I think it's the handmade aspect of tapes that CD mixtapes never quite managed and infinitely shuffled MP3s never will. The mechanical shove of the Play/Rec buttons together imprinting your enthusiasms on the tape and marking an enthusiasm with a physical act of conviction that downloading cannot match. Artisan kung-fu creativity. Hell, yeah!

I'll definitely be keeping a rheumy eye open for future stuff. For a remake of Robin of Sherwood, or a folk hero of my own devising that robs from the time-rich to delegate to the future, dressed top to toe in Soylent green.

Rating: Cornwall/Ultraworld out of Michigan

The 2kDozen 500: #177 - The Time and Space Machine, "Taste the Lazer"

A luscious cover on this album, very lush indeed. Psychedelic colours and a kind of art deco font that suggest there might be riches within or that the label has a good design department. (I'm sure labels don't have departments any longer; that seems a very twentieth century way of structuring things.) It features Richard Norris too, previously of house/techno cross-pollinators The Grid in another life; and they were good, The Grid - they cross-pollinated in a most entertaining fashion.

This is more of a cosmic cowboy ride across the crimson skies, especially in the epic "Black Rainbow", a title I could never tire of. There are organs being leaned on, a woodwind-like refrain looping over and over and plenty of echo chamber around the guitar solo. The mind is very focused in listening. An alarm kicks off "Pill Party in India" and there's a sweet, dubby beat that appears and moves things on in very satisfactory fashion. "Out of My Head" is a live band version of a Chemical Brothers tune as yet unrecorded; it stomps with lysergic boots on, shaking up the dancefloor. Live drums don't sound as party-pooping as they can to my ears at times, especially riding the cymbal at the end.

Some of it motors around less successfully than other parts - "Explosions in the Sky" doesn't really go anywhere, for example. Nice bit of backward stuff, mind. It mellows a little for "Magic Mountain" with flutes and the like and ends on a track called "Good Morning", so as to map out the party to its obvious conclusion. The tracks with propulsive bass as those I like more. The quieter ones meander too long, rivers of negligent flow. Fun jams for them, but not pickling my process so much.

Rating: Lysergic out of Cosmos

The 2kDozen 500: #176 - Bad Brains, "I Against I"

Peel Archive again. A band I read about but never heard properly, again. A chance to remedy this, again.

It's a very reggae title, but the title track bears very little resemblance to anything of a natty dread nature that I can recall. It's fast, highly produced and squealing with metal portent. Though I'm pretty sure all music was faster and more nervy in the Eighties. Even Happy Mondays' first album was a janglefest.

"Re-Ignition" is paced more slowly, has a more intense burn; but I can't quite make out where the lyrics are going. He's got a curious nasal delivery. I can imagine how tunes like this went down well at the time in 1986. No hair metal pomposity, more laid-back than other DC bands with open space in the music, but also with some straight edge philosophy to give it some ethical starch. Faith No More territory, but with a more obviously political edge.

There's talk of love, but it's not clear whether it's actually love they are thinking of or whether it's a cypher for something else, partly because I can make so few lyrics out. I don't believe the "she" of "She's Calling You" is a real woman, but an idea of a country or something else. "Sacred Love" doesn't quite add up as an actual relationship. Vocals are literally 'phoned in - from a prison, so I can't make a decent ear fist of the lyrics. Or maybe I'm thinking too hard about the whole thing?

Rating: Spacious out of Fierce