I pause to record that I feel in extraordinary form. Delirium perhaps

Tweet Although I am yoked to the school schedule, I don't get paid for the school holidays, so, nice as the holidays were, I returned to work with a certain amount of relief today. Glad to be earning a few bucks. And glad too, after a couple of hours getting back in gear, to recalibrate to a work environment where you are the weirdo if you don't make jazz hands and bawl the entire lyrics to 'It's a Hard Knock Life' (Annie, 1982) to a child before lunch. I'm glad to be at work, in short.

Here are some bits and pieces which are on the stereo right now

Axel Willner did amazing stuff with trancey techno a few years ago - pulled it inside out, eked emotion out of repetition, and so on. The people who applauded his skills (including me) typically came to him the long way around. We were not that deeply doused in the sort of mid nineties trancey shit that was obviously in swirling 'round other peoples' brains (e.g. the above). We were too busy worrying about indie.

The Field is a genius, mind you. Yet! Listen up and hear his pulsating roots (especially, exactly 4.05 *ahem*).

Let's hop off the techno wrecking ball 'cos it is only Wednesday, and there are loads of cool tunes floating around right this second, and anyway the ball whispered to me that it was going to gleefully start wrecking more shit to this.

MP3: Miracle Fortress-Raw Spectacle

I interviewed these guys (this guy) ages ago for the first ever issue of Analogue Magazine. Said dude who may have been called Graham (but let's call him 'Miracle Fortress' like 'McBane') had set intentions about the project. He really wanted the album at hand to be cohesive, no filler - so he hung microphones at odd angles on strings in rooms, and fiddled, and barked into them, while his bandmates ate crisps.

Well who is eating crisps NOW?

(Miracle Fortress's bandmates, probably).

His new album is as sealed up as the last one was. It bobs perfectly in the sort of smooth transparent snowglobe world that his first album did. It's coloured in by M83 (Saturdays = Youth) and Caribou (anything he wrote). Great stuff. And Pantha du Prince has done the obligatory remix.

P.S. this is what passed for a review on this blog in 2007

"Combine harvesters are great. I'd trade a bollock to escape the dreary January buzz right now and drive a combine into a dusty Canadian sunset."

Have  a go lads. Mr Tayto swears it's slippy and painless.

MP3: Robag Wruhme-Thora Vukk

This is the sort of track that makes you question your headphones. Like how, deep do they go? How much crispy shit can they take at one end, and how much beating the durty hollow shite out of an empty corrugated cowshed can they take at the other?

The oddly named Robag (we can assume he comes from Berlin) is having a bit of a techno moment in the sun this Spring. His oddly named (yah, again) Wuppdeckmischmampflow mixtape on Kompakt slid straight into the Immer slipstream, by tickling the balls of indie music, farting melodies, and spectacularly, nay brazenly, sticking it to the mixtape snobs by stretching Villalobos's Dexter over most of its first half. Even better, his recent Resident Advisor mix was full of 'chillwave'.

Ace.

Oh, if you're mad into techno you already know Robag is a former Wighnomy brother, and you're delighted this solo shit is so epic right?