Kilowatts - Ground State

[abasio]

Kilowatts

Ground State

Native State Records

1st December 2007

 

Tracklist

1 Astral Accident (7:21)

2 Two Parts (7:36)

3 Deep Sea (8:00)

4 Old Twisted Trees (8:23)

5 Dub Serious (7:33)

6 Azure (7:58)

7 Hang Gliding (6:27)

8 Monument (8:32)

 

 

Well, when I heard this in a record shop I was less than impressed. It didn’t sound very deep or particularly interesting so I didn’t buy it. I bought it from Saiko Sounds early in 2008 though after buying & loving some of Native States compilations. I’m glad I did, this is a great album. It fills the gap between chill & uptempo nicely with groovy basslines, interesting melodies & nice fat beats.

 

1. Astral Accident

We kick of the album with a nice melodic synth pushing up & up. Wet sounds in the background before a nice crisp beat kicks in. The bassline kicks in stronger than the beat did & we are really in a cool funky place musically. I imagine the chill out room at a D&B club. The bass is chunky like in D&B but the beats shuffle in a much more relaxed enjoyable tempo. It also has the atmospheric background ambience of quality ambient that adds a really dreamy feel that lets your mind float away, the beats & bass though firmly roots your body to the Earth & it feels like I’m being torn between the astral plane & the terran one. Very nice track, grounded yet spacey at the same time. The glitchy ending is a bit weird but fits nicely & blend perfectly into the next track

 

2. Two Parts

A heavy sharp beat pierces the track in two. The shuffles around it & the weird bleepy sounds fade into insignificance as the beat dominates but in a good way. As it leaves a slow plodding bassline creeps in & you can really feel the rushing of the background sounds. The beat returns in more of a plodding pace as it drives a massive truck through your mind. I feel like my mind has crashed listening to this, it’s powerful throbbing sounds pulsate but the background still feels spacey & floaty. 4 minutes in the bassline picks up the pace into a really groovy body moving one, it’s really hard not to move at least your head and shoulders to this one & if you are one the train people will stare at you.

 

3. Deep Sea

It doesn’t sound particularly wet but it does sound like it’s temming with dark tiny life. The start is filled with loads of glitchy little sounds & when the relaxed dubby beat kicks in it still feels like tiny organisms at the bottom of the ocean milling about but this time menaced by a bigger fish. The bassline hums a dark tune & the beats kick around like big fish in a bigger pond. It’s all very underground & there is a bleakness to it that suggest the bottom of the ocean but it’s not until about 3 and a half minutes in that it really gets some wet sounds mixed in there. Not wet like water but definitely damp. It really kicks of with some energy at the end as the synth work takes over & blows everything out of the water. Really damn great glitchy stuff that has me smiling & my body moving each time. Love it.

4. Old Twisted Trees

An oldschool feel to it with synths that rise up, beats that kick like old hip hop did and sounds that feel like they’ve come out of the spectrum era. Well done though & when the bassline comes in it adds a coherence that was really needed. The bassline takes the track to a new level, from random stuff thrown together to an actual tune. The bassline moves later on in a very melodius way. It twists and turns from melodious to dark to spacey to night time to melodious again. It gets very deep at times with a real crunchy edge. The twists & turns keep on coming with a meldoy & matching bassline at the final stretch that sound like they have come right out of a 80’s computer game if those games were made today & made to make you dance.

 

5. Dub Serious

I don’t know what serious is supposed to mean but if it means that it is not joking about taking your cerebral cortex into delerium then this track is poorly named. The intro is standar enough but when the bassline kicks in it is just mindblowing. The simplicity of the changing levels might not seem like much on paper but is incredibly effective when heard through a set of headphones and I must admit that I’ve only ever noticed this through headphones. Of course I’ve never heard it on a big sound system like at a festival but I’m sure it would sound even better there. It doesn’t so much as make you dance as it does incapacitate you it’s greatness. Best track on the album.

 

6. Azure

A more glitchy roken beat start to this track doesn’t exacttly fill me with awe but it settles after a few minutes when the bassline comes. There a re cool sounds that oscillate in & out and the atmosphere gets spacier as the track goes on. The background sounds alone would make this a really nice piece of space ambient but the bass & the beats really ground it in our spectrum of thought. In the final run the melody compliments the bassline and they both run away with the beat to a higher plane where the brain just trips away. By the ened of the track I just feel like I’m in some old euphoric chill track broken up by the harsh beats

 

7. Hang Gliding

Straight in with a glitchy dub feel. The bass is dubby as can be and the beats crash against themselves it an almost violent fashion. The scratchiness of the track makes way though for a melody that half comes in & tries to fly. The deep bass sounds though stop it in it’s tracks & everytime it tries to lift itself higher into the sky it is scupered by the bss. The battle itself is interesting as you are kept in suspense as to who will will win out in the end. Ground or space?

 

8. Monument

Probably the most grounded of the tracks here with a bass & beat that reall scream affection for the soil. There are a few spacey sound but they only confound the senses as the eat & bass are so dominant that although the atmosphere manages to send the mind to outerspace it is instantly grounded on an alien planet that has no semblance to Earth hence the glitch so bad it sounds like the CD is skipping. I’ve never quite understood the need to make people think that you have no idea what you are doin during a track a brak the beats so much that there is no cohesiveness at all in them & they really do feel like the artist has just fucked something up but never bothered to put it right. That is what a brief part of this sounds like. The rest is bloody brilliant but there needs to be some kind of stance againts glitch that just sounds shit & at the level of random fart sounds as that is what is used halfway throug this track. It could have been great but that tiny section really wrecks the track for me.

 

 

All in all then this is a damn good album. The sounds are so crisply produced that you’ll need a good sound system or a decent set of headphones to fully appreciate it. If you don’t have either then don’t worry because this album is as good cosmetically on the surface as it is deep when you really listen to it deeply. There is enough for a chill out room in a club that wants people to dance even there & there is enough for the home listener that wants his brain to be taken far away by the music. The production is good enough to please any techno junkie but the ideas are present enough to please the relaxed psy in us all.

[amphiton]

I like this, though I'm not sure I like it more than his previous album. I need to give more listens to this one.

 

Few tracks here are a pure bliss of positive vibrations.