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Sunday 28 October 2012

Professor Genius - Hassan (That's right - MORE L.I.E.S.!)

Disclaimer - this review was originally written when the Hassan album was due to be released, pressing problems have pushed it back almost a year so it's great it's finally arrived, I'm a bit lazy so I've only quickly updated the below so apologies if it's out of date.

Hassan I Sabbah was a 13th century Persian warlord, leader of an army of skilled assassins notorious for their daring and murderous antics. He lived in a mountain fortress and inspired slavish devotion in his followers by offering them the key to the kingdom of heaven – a paradise full of drugs and girls, naturally – if only they would follow his every heinous command.



Anything named after such a man clearly has a lot to live up to. Thankfully Hassan, the first album by Professor Genius (Italians Do It Better, Disques Sinthommes and THISISNOTANEXIT), is a synth-laden bit of homegrown exotica with some mesmerising stories to tell. It’s a spell-binding swirl of textures and contrasts, shot through with distinctly middle Eastern motifs and drone-like krautrock atmospherics.

The album opens with Hassan 1, an ambientish number that feels like an awakening. It tip toes up and down arpeggios and emits shimmery noises that sound like stars as it checks its capacity for cosmic utterances hasn’t been diminished. The album takes its time in drawing itself up to full height but certainly by half way through the layers of texture and percussion have developed into something fully FULLY captivating.

Multi-layered middle Eastern percussion sits below swirling, to-die-for synth soundscapes which conjure up the northern lights, secret orders and exotic mysticism. The effect is intoxicating, especially on the later tracks such as Alamut where far below, powerful waves of bass throb with lazy menace. On other tracks like Dream of Skin, reedy, metallic melodies dominate, pulsating with droning insistence as buzz and feedback provide shifting backdrop to the cinematic sounds. The whole album is awash with vibrating, hypnotic tones and streams of noise, layered and drawn into self-contained worlds ordered with exotic percussion. Banks of keyboards declare their uneasiness as eerie melodies loop above cloak-and-dagger synthetic landscapes. Somehow, this is an album which  soothes and menaces in equal degrees.

A big departure from his previous releases, this album sees Professor Genius move into cinematic imaginings of very specific and evocative character, time and place. In that, its fairly unique among synth-based music, which is so often stretching for the future or looking back with a nostalgic idealism. And for the still new-ish (ish) label LIES, it’s also a real depature, testament to a breadth of vision unhinted at by their typical holding pattern of strong releases from analogue house producers such as Legowelt, Steve Summers and Maximillion Dunbar. Looking forward to the forthcoming L.I.E.S. American Noise compilation!

PS. Don't forget to check out the remixes: 

Sunday 21 October 2012

Photos of Fordlandia

Henry Ford built Fordlandia, a prefabricated industrial town in the middle of the Brazilian jungle, in 1928. Its sole aim - which it never really achieved - was to provide the Ford motor company with a plentiful supply of rubber, helping them avoid the presumably higher prices of the rubber which came from the then-British colony of Malay. At the time, without synthetic rubber, the only way to get rubber for car tyres was to grow it. Sadly the rubber plantations ran into all sorts of problems (read about them here and here), and the Detroit-in-the-Jungle never really took off. The invention of synthetic rubber in 1945 made the whole thing even more poignantly pointless.

Much the same as he'd done back in Detroit, Ford built places for his workers to live, hospitals and places to socialise in, and kept a close close eye on the place (no smoking, women or drinking, even in private quarters).

The first photos (the 'then') are from the 1920s and 1930s, and as well as showing glimpses of early Fordlandia they're a lot about early industrialisation, labour & leisure, the effect of industrialisation on the landscape, the first stirrings of globalisation and definitely some sort of colonial-industrial mentality.

The second photos (the 'now) are by photographer Scott Chandler, and it's always nice to see images of buildings being reclaimed by the land. Oddly creeply, but nice. Enjoy.