Although this is his debut recorded release, Greek sound designer John Valasis has spent several years working amongst that country’s music industry, primarily as a mixing engineer and producer for other artists. This debut CD under his Poordream alias arrives as a split release between netlabel 33 Recordings and Spectraliquid, and collects together two new tracks ‘Immaterial Monarch’ and ‘Sounds Of Consciousness’ alongside no less than eight different remixes of the title track by a cast of Greek producers. Based around an outraged retro-cinema vocal sample that sounds like it almost could have been taken from classic corporate-paranoia flick Network, Immaterial Monarch sees Valasis nicely counterpointing the sense of gathering doom with a glittering backdrop of clicking, glitchy downbeat rhythms, tinkling pianos and ominous buzzes of sub-bass, the wistful background vocal harmonies that trail in towards the very end calling to mind the likes of Black Lung meeting SubtractiveLAD’s abstract-folk tinged explorations head-on.
By contrast, ‘Sounds Of Consciousness’ gets considerably more psychedelic, as elastic-sounding analogue synth tones slowly uncoil like fangs around a sampled vocal passage that sounds like it’s been taken from an Eastern spiritualist – apart from some slightly heavy-handed overuse of vocoders towards the end, it’s certainly solidly impressive stuff. As for the remixes of ‘Immaterial Monarch’, there’s certainly a huge range of sonic territory covered, ranging Broken Tempo’s upbeat, funk-infused retake, which even manages to slide female soul vocals and jangling guitars in there, through to Dama’s furious hardstep drum and bass reworking, which nicely plays the delicate piano notes off against some fairly face-slicing snares. While all the remixes are solidly impressive however, the sense of repetition soon begins to creep in, especially after hearing that sampled paranoiac speech for the eighth time or so, and it’s a slight pity that this debut release doesn’t feature more of Valasis’ own original tracks.
Chris Downton
