Not a bad way to come in and probably not a bad way to go out. This is the first actual full blown album release from Damian Lazarus’s eccentric London-based label, Crowtown Rebels having previously plied their trade on a sharp range of 12” and mix session releases from such unlikely suspects as Matt Tolfrey & Craig Sylvester, Presslaboys, Kiki & Silversurfer, Frankie Flowerz, and André Kraml – a bewildering conflation of minimal electro, techno dub, house and digital disco, and cramming in as many cultures as possible into the unstable stable from Berlin to Bethnal Green.
And what are they opening their account with? Pier Bucci – the audacious Chile-based weirdo-dance enthusiast who’s currently pushing the boundaries of traditional South American music with his fellow countrymen Ricardo Villalobos and Luciano.
Having has previously recorded with Argenis Brito as Mambotur (Multicolour recordings), with Argenis and Luciano as Monne Autonme (Lo-Fi Stereo) Pier Bucci also co-produced last year’s Lucien-N-Luciano album ‘Blind Behaviour’ (Peacefrog) but this is the first time he has branched out as a solo artist and decided to work under his own name.
With two critically acclaimed EP’s under his belt (‘Cinetico Andino’ and ‘Advanced Romance’) Bucci thinks nothing of dusting off his laptop and splicing together a good ten tracks of almost seamless music, harmonies and rhythms occasionally augmented by the slurring, erotic vocals of the ghostly Armelle Pioline. Whilst fans of Fourtet, Minotaur Shock and Pedro are likely to be left giddy and breathless by the release fans of Keane may be disappointed – as this is not a ‘tunes’ album by any stretch of the imagination. There’s also no podgy-faced public schoolboy to poke fun at by way of entertainment either – so there. What you do have is a good half-hours worth of randomly sequential and sparse electronica that strips the traditional South American rhythms down to their simplex forms and rewires them with buzzes, beeps and bloop tones. Yet bizarrely – it still has grooves.
Definitely worth checking out – but remember, this is NOT Space Cowboy.