Penguin Mechanics Vol III
1999
IDM / Abstract / Industrial
By the time the turn of the century came rolling around, IDM as a genre appeared to be in the midst of a big second wave, which saw a ton of little netlabels popping up all over the U.S., Canada, and Europe. The biggish labels that had managed to nurture the music into a palpable level of prominence throughout the early to mid-90s, thanks to promotion, press junkets, distribution deals, and generally good music business acumen, were losing their effective roles as gatekeepers. Because of the internet and the changing ways people consumed music, all one really needed now to start a record label was a computer and some free time, which ended up leveling the playing field a good bit, and vastly increasing the amount of good IDM that was out there, too.
Enter Kracfive, a label that was originally launched from the tiny New England town of Hollis, New Hampshire by three engineering students. Like most netlabels, Kracfive's popularity grew in IDM circles by word-of-mouth through message boards, email listservs, chatrooms, and peer-to-peer file-sharing networks like Napster.
In their third year of existence, Kracfive released a compilation called Penguin Mechanics Vol III (there's no first or second volume, lol), which featured some of the label's own talent as well as some big European gets like Freeform, Brothomstates (before he landed on Warp in '01), and V/vm, the latter of whom's music I will never personally understand. And the comp came with one loose requirement: every artist had to make a song that in some way resembled the sound of some kind of machine. According to the liner notes, this included using "klankgrinding, motor whirring, metallic collisions, beeps and buzzes" as "rhythmic components."
Cool concept on paper, but two things to take note of here: one, it doesn't seem like every track really abides by the rule that Kracfive set, and two, they probably could've whittled this down to an EP because the first half is actually pretty boring.
But the second half is a lot better, and I think it's because for all of the mechanical sounds and abstract textures that the artists were able to yield with their recordings, their decision to pair them with emotive melodies enabled them to go down much smoother. And those tunes that incorporate melodies seem to all be on this album's back half. "Magnificent Storming" by the virtually unknown Chaircrusher is a whirlwind of schizophrenic IDM paranoia, and because of its wild twists and turns, it's also probably the biggest rulebreaker on here, but it's also probably the album's brightest shining moment, too.
Brothomstates - "Not Kava"
Miragliuolo - "Sandwich Train"
Pacman - "Citybuilder"
Colongib - "Angry Robot Locked In Compartment Wrenches Itself Free"
Chaircrusher - "Magnificent Storming"
