#2000s leftfield

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Today’s compilation:

Invisible Soundtracks Macro 3 2000 Leftfield / Downtempo / Ambient / IDM

Cool sampler here from the UK’s Leaf label, an outlet that used to specialize in abstract and leftfield electronic productions before branching out widely like Warp did. At the time, Leaf was most famous for releasing music from two specific artists: Susumu Yokota, who was probably the most underrated and most underappreciated electronic musician of all time, and Caribou, who was known as Manitoba before catching a lawsuit from “Handsome Dick” Manitoba of the punk band The Dictators. This compilation, which is comprised mostly of exclusives, features great offerings from both Yokota and Caribou and has some other choice nuggets as well, like an intense piece of trip hop by Broadway Project that features some dramatic and spooky choir singing. 

Some quality turn-of-the-century leftfield electronic ephemera right here. Whole album’s up on Spotify and YouTube, too, if you’re interested.

Highlights:

Manitoba - “Anna and Nina” Druckwelle - “Unteracherting” Susumu Yokota - “Fancy Flavour” David Sheppard & Keiron Phelan - “Theme From Cardinal Menthol” Broadway Project - “Roman Bones”

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Benge - “Dream Of Dreamy” Substancia 2 2000 Leftfield / Abstract

From Discogs:

Benge is Ben Edwards. He has been exploring the sonic possibilities of electronic instruments since he was a small boy when he would spend his evenings in the music room of the school his parents ran. Being the 1970s it was full of synths and organs as well as percussion, recording and other classroom instruments. After graduating from art school in 1990 he began to set up a music studio and started recording his own blend of electronica, culminating in his debut album "Electro-Orgoustic Music" and the formation of Expanding Records in 1995. Since then he has released fourteen albums as Benge.

If you do any reading about Benge, you're likely to learn about his 2008 album, Twenty Systems, for which he used twenty different synthesizers that were released between the twenty year period of 1968 to 1987 for twenty different songs, having devoted one synthesizer to each song. The ambient music and synths god Brian Eno gave the album a heap of praise by calling it "a brilliant contribution to the archeology of electronic music."

Anyway, I bring that album up to present to you a song that Benge made some years prior called "Dream Of Dreamy," a mangled stew of electronic, leftfield abstraction that originally appeared on a sampler from 2000 called Substancia 2, which was released by the Belgian king label of bleepy electronic weirdness, Quatermass.

While Twenty Systems was an album that featured twenty individual tracks that  highlighted a specific synthesizer for each song, "Dream Of Dreamy" sounds like a tune with the inverse idea in mind: a fuckton of synthesizers (I'm not gonna actually count that shit) with other sounds and rhythms packed into just one song. It's just a splattering, spluttering, overloaded mess of fun intrigue, alternately led by what sounds like a chiming harpsichord preset and a looping, bleepy sci-fi phrase. It's sort of like the abstract electronic music equivalent of the prelude to a nuclear meltdown. You know in the movies where the pressure meter at the nuclear power plant is pushed into the dangerous, red territory, which causes all the bells to ring, the whistles to whistle, steam to suddenly materialize, buzzers to buzz, and a robotic voice to warn? This is like a tranquilizing version of that, but rather than having a calm, female British voice repeating phrases like "warning," or "danger," "Dream Of Dreamy" uses a Speak & Spell imported from the depths of hell that's just been doused with a bucket of water instead.

I wonder what would happen if I decided to put this beautiful and wicked monstrosity on repeat while I slept. Would I actually dream of Dreamy? Hmmm, I don't think I really wanna know the answer to that.