ilkae - bovine rearrangement review from pitchfork media "This is my world-- it stinks, don't it?", Jacky Hughes said to Newsweek in a Nov. 16, 1981 piece about how video games-- and the billions of Washingtons they stole-- had fingerprinted the American fabric. The article mentioned that our man described himself as a "Times Square drifter who can shine in the Broadway arcades." Hughes added, "When you start to think you're a loser, you come here and get 4,000 at Space Invaders, and you ain't a loser anymore." I'll drink to that. Maybe there is a connection between losing half of my childhood to my Nintendo systems plus the local corner shop's arcade and my present affection for mutated techno. The dinner jazz for a barbarian movie juxtaposed with swords slashing metal as heard in stage two of Strider engrosses me in a daze as much as how Autechre exploits my skull as a punching bag in their number, "Surripere". However, I could also blame most of my future health problems and failures to bearably socialize on the ungodly video game, if so many child shrinks and Senators Joseph Lieberman and Herb Kohl would tell me. If anything, there is no worse hangover than the one from playing a game like Advance Wars for 10 hours straight-- the eye strain, the purples and red visages burned into your retinas, and the impulse to run back and forth into a trance to resuscitate that buzz. Traces of such bygone anxiety and bliss awake whenever I hear Secede's remix of an Ilkae tune. Someone is first overheard playing a Nintendo Gameboy Advance game as its erratic rings and squelched "power-up" noises attest. A dazed department-store lobby Muzak organ then kicks in to lead a rousing techno-pop jaunt akin to a game's victory music when the planner beats a level. The melody remains faithful to video-game synthesizers, and it's simultaneously elating and queasy. On Ilkae's 2001 album, Pistachio Island, Canadian and Polish teenagers Aaron Munson and Krystian Lubiszewski wore their deficient attention spans and zest for what seemed like imaginary video game soundtracks on an IDM tip. The elements were all there in its 45 tracks: rhythms that could accelerate or die off in a moment, 8-bit synth melodies, and the nagging feeling that you should feel guilty for playing with children's toys. For Bovine Rearrangement, Pistachio gets remixed by Ilkae's brethren in the post-techno underground, namely from the Merck stable. The 19 results mostly score pointers for enhancing what were typically one to two minute sketches on the original album. No specific remixed tracks were named on the CD cover. Explicitly furthering the Nintendo vibe is Vim! who throws together an erratic medley of accurate Gameboy Advance-level jingles that seemingly change whenever the artist is bored with a level. Daedelus deepens Ilkae's melancholia with drifting organ drones and laundry dryer-like percussion. Even stronger are Machine Drum's fountainhead washed synths and broken hip-hop beats, and Octopus Inc.'s psychosomatic flashbacks. The rest of Bovine dwells in the music box fetish or downtempo meditations that drift with a head hanging down through the spotless, glass-domed megapolises that so much post-techno/armchair techno/IDM has indulged in for so many years. While it's not progress, these blues can still make losers feel like winners, however the natural light burns their eyes as they stagger out of the arcades. -Cameron Macdonald, February 15, 2005 ilkae - bovine rearrangement review from igloomag.com Bovine Rearrangement is a remix disc where 19 + 1 remixers come at an Ilkae track with their own spatial vision and knob-twiddling aesthetic. The original track (or maybe it's an entire record that is being subverted here) isn't included, allowing us to come at Bovine Rearrangment from a variety of mindsets. You can visit it as a remix disc, or disregard that small detail altogether and simply enjoy it as a smorgasbord of barely linked musical ideas. Me? I'm totally tabula rasa on this one. As you can imagine, there is a wide variety of flavors here. There's video game music from Vim and Secede (the former goes full-on Mario Bros. soundtrack for their remix, while Secede sucks in noises from old console games and hangs them like Christmas tree ornaments off the melody line); there's a Jamaican dub and steel drum interpretation from Kettel, a deliciously glitchy variation with long organic tones and whirling passages of reckless stringed instruments by Deadelus and a version by Joseph Nothing that uses water pipes and space noises from lost UFOs. Sprightly hiccuping electro-clash from Setzer keeps the mood light while Tim Koch constructs a version of squelchy analog synthesis, bubbling 8-bit notes, and icy grandeur to give his rearrangement a cinematic scope. Isan's mix is the crystalline morphine drip for which they are known while o9's mix is filled with windy echoes and watery reverberations. Label-mate Machine Drum slows everything down to half-speed, idling in the sub-cellar where all the tones are fat and heavy, and MD turns the core melody into a slippery lounge mix, filled with ghostly light and soft-focus tones. Merck went all IDM Pokémon -- gotta catch them all! -- on Bovine Rearrangement, casting their nets wide for a diverse assortment of remixes. And, as it turns out, the source material was the artist's choice from one of the forty-five tracks on Ilkae's debut record, Pistachio Island. It's a lot of choices that seem to have one thing in common: a beguiling seduction inherent in Ilkae's source material. When other labels like Schematic, Warp and Rephlex are doing their damnest to mystify their listeners, its nice to see a label release a collection of work that makes your brain smile. -Mark Teppo ilkae - bovine rearrangement review from smallfish london THIS SOUNDS LIKE A PIECE OF ART THAT DAMIEN HURST MIGHT KNOCK TOGETHER. BUT NO. NOT ENTIRELY SURE WHERE THE BOVINE COMES IN, BUT THIS COULD MORE ACURATELY BE CALLED ELECTRONIC REARRANGEMENTS - BEING AS IT IS AN ALBUM OF REMIXES. 19 TRACKS BY AN ALLSTAR CAST OF ELECTRONIC MUSICIANS. THE OVERWHELMING FEELING IS QUITE LOVELY ELECTRONICA, BUT IT IS VERY DIVERSE: OFTEN VERY SWEET MELODIES, OCCASIONALLY WITH A REAL POP FEEL, SOME CUT UP AND MORE ABSTRACT, COMPLICATED AND GENTLE BEATS ABOUND, TEXTURE AND GLITCH GET A LOOK IN - YOU GET THE PICTURE. THIS IS A GOOD ALBUM, FEATURING THE TALENTS OF SECEDE, SHEX, DAEDELUS, SETZER, TIM KOCH, VIM, CARRIER TWO, JOSEPH NOTHING, ISAN, OCTOPUS INC, 09, MACHINEDRUM, LACKLUSTER, MD, HELIOS, POREM AND PROSWELL. ilkae - bovine rearrangement review from grooves 16 & textura As Merck's late-'04 release schedule includes near-coincident discs from Ilkae, Deru, and Machine Drum, it affords a prime opportunity to check in with the label and get updated on its current state of well-being. These latest missives show the label in fine form and hitting a nice stride, and if anything increasingly difficult to pigeonhole. Far from being a Schematic or Warp clone, the label's forging its own sound, bolstered by a huge roster of artists—all of whom seem to be contributors to Ilkae's latest outing Bovine Rearrangement, a massive remix project from Krystian Lubiszewski and Aaron Munson who asked each artist to remake one of the forty-five (!) tracks from their Ilkae debut Pistachio Island. Given the nature of the project, it's hard to form a reliable impression of the group's sound when its music gets refracted in twenty different ways, though a general strain of arcade-flavoured hip-hop gradually emerges; imagine the midpoint between the sweet melodic richness of Morr Music and Merck's rougher-edged beatmaking and you're flying in the right direction. There's an irrepressibly joyous heart beating at Ilkae's centre which refreshes, given its relative rarity in the often dour electronic field, though the album's second half does shift the mood into more experimental and ambient zones. Contributors include Merck regulars like Machine Drum and Helios but friends like Isan appear too, enriching the album with broad stylistic variety. Among the numerous highlights, Secede opens the set with a robust starburst overture that soars and glistens, while Kettel adds sunkissed steel drums to infectious shimmying grooves. Daedelus merges Autechrian clanks and whirrs with sweeping string samples, in contrast to Isan's paradisiacal oasis of glistening insect flutter. In the second half, Proem's laconic funk throbs and lashes, while Proswell conjures a elegiac idyll of gaseous vapours and piercing symphonic tones. Shex, Carrier Two, o9, Tim Koch, Setzer, Octopus Inc., Joseph Nothing, Lackluster, and MD round out the cast. Not all the pieces work so well—Vim's is undone by excessively frenetic channel-hopping, making its beats confusedly stumble over themselves—but such lapses are rare. By album's end, your impression of Ilkae's sound may still be unfocused but you'll be more than satisfied by the embarrassment of riches.

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