machine drum - bidnezz review from pitchfork media Prefuse 73's Scott Herren didn't patent glitch-hop; he simply popularized the "cutup" method of cramming as many damn musical thoughts as possible into each minute. Many other underground luminaries had already connected Dirty South crunk with the cubist contortions of Autechre and Mouse on Mars: Push Button Objects, Funkstorung, Otto Von Schirach, and Jimmy Edgar, to name a few. Deriding these artists for plagiarizing each other's ideas would be remiss. It would be like rejecting the entire generation of 60s Anglo blues geeks who mimicked (some say bastardized) the harmonics and attitudes of their Chess 45s. That said, Bidnezz-- the fourth albun from Machine Drum's Travis Stewart-- could sound to some like a collection of One Word Extinguisher b-sides. However, Stewart's record has more breathing space than and a tunefulness that seems missing in Prefuse 73's beat obsession. Plus, Stewart already made his name in glitch-hop with the 2001 milestone, Now You Know, which was released months before many critics sold Herren as indie hip-hop's reason for living. Bidnezz is a continuation of the haphazard rhythms and poetics that Stewart toyed with on his previous album, Urban Biology, but without that record's cavity-grinding sentimentality. Soulful moments like "Time Turned Over Itself" resemble cool-jazz/R&B soundtracks for auto malls or mutual fund commercials whose satellite transmissions got frayed in the Earth's shattered ozone layer. It's an ace noise. Opener "Entrau" is a throat-clearing introduction that loops a keyboard ring from the "dream sequence" of some kiddie TV show. Right before the ecstasy rubs salt in the ear, the amputated crunk of "Disa Bling" hobbles in. There, female "eh's" are ricocheted between a muttering background and a shouting foreground, while some distracting dub organ vamps are thrown in for good measure. "$$legs" brims with AM static-clogged, hip-hop thuds that sink a Holiday Inn lounge piano tune. And then arrives "Babbling", a diarrheal DSP release of scrambled voices from the dead. Stewart, bless his mortal soul, disrupts the album's groove with such abrupt tracks of whooshing musique concrete repellant like "Worldcomin", "Wiggle", and the vile "Badgerman". The digitally incomprehensible recording of homeys bragging about their Dirty South beats in "Hipsteos" almost qualifies, but at least it's about something. Meaningful discord also graces the album's highlights-- Stewart gets bored when things grow too pleasant. "Stevie Bam Jackson" trudges to a waterdrop metronome as soul radio samples and Victoria's Secret muzak flash by. Our man then shreds everything and denies responsibility. Bidnezz's most arresting moment, "Mltply", skitters a Rhodes-funk riff over a sublime, blue-sky flute duet with upright bass. "End of C" is a minute-long trance of strings time-stretched into a leaking flood basin that wrecks the song's recording tape. You frighten me, Stewart. -Cameron Macdonald machine drum - bidnezz review from urb magazine Despite its pretensions, laptoprock is sometimes so "on" it doesn't matter how "inside" the inside joke is. Bidnezz brigns creativity so unspoiled you'll remember when you liked electronic music because you thought it could be pushing things forward. Best album of its kind since I Care Because You Do. Yeah, I said it. -KJ machine drum - bidnezz review from the wire coming soon machine drum - bidnezz review from igloomag.com Soaring ambient opening notwithstanding, Bidnezz hiccups and stutters like it is the performance art piece for the Dance of the Misfit Toys. With twenty-two tracks that take anywhere from less than thirty seconds to more than five minutes to present their broken toy choreography, Bidnezz hums with the chaotic spasms of fractured hip-hop. Imagine Dr. Dre bringing in Oval to do final tweaking of the latest West Coast blunt tracks. Vibraphone and drum kit perform a loungesque soft shoe in "Wallis & Futuna (remix of Steve & Rob)" while digital processes slice and drop the duet into a hiccuping instrumental. The gentle mood of "Dog Actually (remix of Mic Mell)" is shattered by a rupturing of sonic walls, a breakthrough that allows surges of scrambled vinyl noises to fill the room. The vocal line of "Hollis (remix of Cinelux)" is heavily sliced, the simple lyrics turned into stuttering gasps of broken words. "Disa Bling" hops and churns around a sliver of voice, a cut-up sample that is folded back on itself a few hundred times until it becomes barely recognizable as having been born from an organic source. "$$legs" is an R & B piano melody that is caught in a static snare and, as it struggles to break free, it distorts and breaks up, becoming a fragmentary ghost of its full-bodied self. Some of the interstitial pieces -- the short bursts of sound that live and die in less than a minute -- are transitional efforts, burps of scattered collages in "Babbling" and "Worldcomin" that erupt like a fast-forward moment on an old tape deck. Others like "Hipsteos" cross your radar like moments of clarity on the radio dial where you interrupt some strange Caribbean transmission already in progress. As individual tracks, they don't last long enough to sustain any life of their own but, when taken in tandem with their adjacent tracks, these small transitional pieces add to the overall texture of Bidnezz: the strange and fragmentary soundtrack for a kingdom of damaged wind-up toys. Travis Stewart makes songs and then cracks them open, curious as to their internal workings. The resulting pieces are patchwork creations with gaps and holes in the integrity of their melodies, leaving room for the exposed tick-tock of their clockwork mechanisms. -Mark Teppo machine drum - bidnezz review from grooves 16 & textura Two years in the making, Bidnezz features twenty-two head-nodders from Travis Stewart (aka Machine Drum, Syndrone, and Tstewart). In this case, the multiple monikers make perfect sense, given how much Bidnezz's chopped vocals and glitchy hip-hop inhabit an entirely different galaxy from Salmataxia's chilly electronics, a fact made abundantly clear once the strangulated, groaning voice snippets of “Disa Bling” appear. Again there's no shortage of strong material. Microsample voice fragments recall Akufen in “Stevie Bam Jackson” though Stewart situates them within a funk mix of glistening keyboard melodies and minced beats rather than microhouse. Dense slabs of crackle almost drown the jazz-tinged hip-hop groove of “$$legs,” while “Offs” underscores stylistic similarities between Machine Drum and Prefuse 73. The best cut might be “Mltply” with its hiccupping drop-outs, melancholy melodic motifs, and frenetically shredded beats but it's merely one strong piece on an album teeming with them. -RS machine drum - bidnezz review from inpress / cyclic defrost (australia) Many would know of Machine Drum from when he visited our shores last year as a guest of the annual Sound Summit in Newcastle. Taking over two years to craft, Bidnezz is filled with the kind of jittery chopped up rhythms and fragments of sound that we’ve come to expect from this eccentric sonic manipulator. Whilst it exists firmly within the reconstructed laptop fraternity and utilises elements of glitch, static and discarded audio fragments, Machine Drum (aka Travis Stewart) manages to distinguish himself via his ability to integrate an urban groove into what had previously been a cold sterile environment. Whilst he flirts with elements of drum and bass, instrumental hip hop, R&B, electro and even house, he approaches these genres in such an eccentric way that they are distorted and deconstructed until they are barely shreds of what we have previously known. On Bidnezz Machine Drum is obsessed with an impossible haltering beat, that makes the music almost sound scratched and damaged and this is the base from which he builds his amazing highly funky tunes. Bidnezz is the sound of urban expression shredded through digital synthesis, hip-hop that has been processed and reprocessed until it has become a strange new electronic beast. -Bob Baker Fish machine drum - bidnezz review from sutemos.net I have many times before that this year is one of the most successful for Miami Merck Records and everybody seems to agree with me. After two brilliant albums of Tiki Obmar and Lateduster in the end of October came out a long awaited third album of Machine Drum and the name of it is Bidnezz. I think Machine Drum does not need to be presented once again but those who didn't listen to electronic music back in 2002 aren't very familiar with this name. I'll try to be as short as possible. American Travis Stewart is hiding under three different names and releases his stuff at Merck only. Firstly, there was Syndrone. In 2000 he has released a Triskaideka album and in 2004 the fabulous Salmataxia was released. Next was Machine Drum - it made Travis popular. He has released two astonishing albums under this name - Now You Know (2001) and Urban Biology (2002). There also was a remix release called Half The Battle which evolved the best artists of Merck. The last one was Tstewart. It seems like a side project of Travis because he has provided some tracks for some compilations (Merck, Imputor, Six Records) under this pseudo. But it is already announced that there will be a full length album of Tstewart. So let's get back to Bidnezz. The world was crazy about the instrumental hip hop format that Machine Drum invented back in 2002. I was crazy about it, too. Things have changed a lot since then. Everyone was playing this kind of genre all over the world. So it is obvious that Machine Drum is losing one of his main trumps - the sense of freshness. He hasn't got it this time. He can't shock you no more. He can't invent anything new. This is what I am lacking in 2004-2005. It turns to be a bid of disadvantage. It is sad that a really quality and good from the technical point album is "swollen" just because everybody else tried to create in the same manner, even those who couldn't do it as good as Machine Drum or Prefuse 73 with Jimmy Edgar. They have screwed the whole style. But that is not the point. Even while listening to the album without any sense of reality you realize that Bidnezz is not as good as it was back in 2001-2002. The first disadvantage is that Travis Stewart is diving into Glitch technologies, leaving IDM behind. The new album of Jimmy Edgar Bounce, Make, Model sounds very alike. It is obvious that this is the direction of evolution and fashion of the next year but that does not really mean that you have to agree with that and enjoy it implicitly. I liked Machine Drum putting his typical sound and beats on IDM more. I have no doubt that all fans of Machine Drum and Prefuse 73 (I find them very much alike) will be happy because their cult-figure has returned and he is the same as before - in a good shape of his sampling manner. But I am also sure that Bidnezz won't be acclaimed as the best album of Travis. This album needs a lot of space and volume so you can move, jump out of joy and rise your hand in the air. So you better not listen to it at home. Bidnezz is the album for fiestas and orgies. Rating: 8 machine drum - bidnezz review from modsquare.com Machinedrum has also been around with his music for a while and also sadly I've missed him before. Bidnezz is actually the first release I'm listening from this young producer of modern electronica. Machinedrum goes into instrumental hip-hop-ish electronic/idm direction with the music here. It's quite well done, when that style or musical expression is concerned. There are lots of tracks on this album, 22 in total, but not all are fully developed tunes, some are just shorter interludes in-between. But when Machinedrum is doing a complete track of 4 to 5 minutes, he usually aims for it to be developed properly, with a certain beginning, middle, ending and an emphasis on the groove, the rhythm and the melody. The groovy part is what's most interesting, which is also present in the shorter tracks of 2 to 3 minutes. The music's not too abstract, Machinedrum manages to keep it catchy enough--often upbeat--and I like that best in the longer tracks, like "Hollis," "Test Yo Strengths" and "Bill O' Wads." The flow is well balanced in the entire album. Excellentlly produced & beautifully executed hip-hop/IDM-inspired fun electronics.-Boban Ristevski machine drum - bidnezz review from earplug.cc The core of Machine Drum's Bidnezz is the stuttering melancholy of its instrumental hip-hop. It's all about the business of hanging on the low (the down low, you know) end of the beat while searching for stress fractures in urban rhythms. The amiable melody of "Mltply" hiccups through a series of Möbius strips where each permutation gathers further accretions of '70s funk. An R&B vocalist struggles to be heard in "Wallis & Futura" as she is strained through a mesh of decaying drum programming and time-lapse digital artifacting. "Dog Actually" spins wildly out of control, its thin ennui dissolving into an emotional flush of backmasking that drains down into the stuttered vocals and echoing grand piano of "Hollis." Bidnezz is a broken toy with a winsome smile that beguiles its way into your pocket. (MT) machine drum - bidnezz review in french from laurent guérel in trax # 80 " Déterminisme cut/off et loops hip-hop, Machine Drum marche sur les traces de son cousin de sillon Prefuse 73 et y laisse ses marques. Bleeps disparates et breakbeat bondissant, basses rondes et crépitements de radio pirate, Machine Drum s'amuse avec la banque de loop de Mo'Wax, dérape sur la chaussée glissante électronica de Planet-Mu. Abstract à gratter, hit-parade des blues, voilà une vision calme et sereine d'un Miami jazzy virevoltant dans une ritournelle de ricochets empruntés à l'Europe grisâtre diffusée par les bandes sonores made in Sheffield (les sonorités de Richard Devine ou d'Autechre). Comme ses voisins de palier Climber, découverts sur Beta Bodega, Machine Drum a parfaitement appris sa leçon et s'évertue avec brio d'y laisser la chaleur du soleil, l'éclat de la lumière et les couleurs du petit matin sur la baie encore endormie. Classique mais impeccable pour nous faire oublier notre temps de crachin...

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