Pontone presents a primer to brilliant music of Ekoplekz made by … Ekoplekz himself, including tracks and outtakes from his debut CD-R “Volume 1″ (finally available to buy here), some stuff from very limited cassette and tunes from forthcoming “Volume 2″.
Download the mixtape (right click > save as)
PLAYLIST:
- Bugz In The Signal Path (exclusive)
- Intruder Alert (“Volume 2″ forthcoming)
- Solid Status (“Volume 1″)
- Washford Dawn (“Volume 1″)
- Quarter Inch Punch (“Volume 1: Outtakes”)
- Cripple Dick Creep (“Volume 1: Outtakes”)
- Empty 3 Ex (“Volume 1″)
- Styloskronk (“Volume 1″)
- Malcolm Clarke (“Volume 1″)
- Ballard Knows Best (“Volume 1: Outtakes”)
- Pescaton 15 (“Doctrine:789305″)
- Phantom Skank (“Doctrine:789305″)
- Abandoned Vessel? (“Volume 2″ forthcoming)
- Transverse (“Doctrine:789305″)
- Eyedent (“Volume 2″ forthcoming)
Review by Matthew Ingram
Ekoplekz “Volume 1″
Aka Nick Gutterbreakz. I’ve stopped registering surprise at the phalanx of bloggers in my cosmos who have turned to making music. We were all clearly (to varying degrees) inept writers with bags of enthusiasm without the nerve or the right opportunities to seize the moment at the first Energy Flash when our contemporaries were grappling with their Ataris. As easy as it might be (in a childishly competitive way) to try and distance myself I’m not about to knock any of these brothers.
This Ekoplekz CD is one of only twenty pressed by Gutter in strictly not-for-profit motives. If you’re remotely familiar with his tastes, let me sketch out the (essentially very focussed) terrain of Nick’s passions: BBC Radiophonics, Robert Rental/Thomas Leer, Cabaret Voltaire, Early WARP, Dubstep. Actually I was delighted to find that he’d by and large avoided adding to the mountain of cleanly soft-synths that is Dubstep. This is music, quite like my own, made amidst a mess of cables on outdated hardware. It also couldn’t be less pristine – like the glorious ink-splattered artwork, this is messy.
If there’s one glaringly obvious precursor to these blind, lolloping, protean grooves it’s Cabaret Voltaire’s “Red Mecca”. In fact everything on here sounds like it could have been unreleased material from those sessions. Or maybe “Red Mecca” itself was the off-cuts? The insectoid guitar skittering in reverb, the insistent rotary synth vamps, the seething radiation pads, the echoated (pre drum-machine) rhythm boxes, the plangent bass-lines…..literally I could go on for days. But miraculously it all ends up sounding very relevant and…..very now. Brilliant – I hope he makes it more widely available.
