Cyclic Defrost

I Put A Record On is certainly a fledgling spawned from the East Berlin techno and dub scenes. For all that, it’s no test tube baby – these sensual and haunting songs are dynamically complex, laced with deep, dark crevices which proffer numerous textural and rhythmic surprises. Monika label-head Gudrun Gut first made a splash with her 7″, whose track ‘Move Me’ garnered a fair amount of acclaim. The song gets this album off and kicking, its warped carnival organ underscores a looped polka jam and a stabbing two-step swing which is surprisingly mesmeric.

The music on a whole is predominantly loop-based. Gut utilises an array of tiny samples, which are usually broken up by some stuttering record skips, along which her spoken-word vocal style forms a lock groove, often creating a disorienting yet hypnotic aura. This works especially well on ‘Girlboogie ’06′, when thick undulating bass notes support some lovely syncopated offbeats. The tracks deft use of repetition turns this simple arrangement into a miasmic blur, a dizzying spin cycle of steady 4/4 beats and coiling bass.

At the same time, the album does grows dry in places; in others, Gut’s odd cross-pollinations – see ‘Pleasuretrain’ with its attempt at something of a dub-blues merger – go terribly awry. Be that as it may, Gut is careful enough to offset herself from time to time; a track such as ‘Sweet’ gets all gangly in its use of awkward cadences while her collaboration with Matt Elliott on ‘Rock Bottom Riser’ uses a grimly incessant snare drum permeated by crunchy textures to create the illusion of stasis. Conceptually limited and lacking in depth in certain places, the album is nevertheless a successful piece of Berlin dub and techno.

Max Schaefer

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