Pantomiman ‎- Amphe Theatre (Looney Moon Records, 2015)

[Templar]

Pantomiman ‎- Amphe Theatre

 

Looney Moon Records, 2015

 

 

1. Cookie

2. Liquidazer

3. Dust - Koala (Pantomiman Remix)

4. Overtones

5. Dacha-cha

6. Thriller

7. Timeless

8. Gringi

9. Yello Blast

10. Spleen Romance

11. Epinephrine

 

http://www.psyshop.com/shop/CDs/lom/lom1cd009.html

 

The name - Pantomiman - meant nothing to me really, but the crazy cover immediately drew my attention and then I remembered a track of his being on V/A Careful Round Us which I very much liked. Turns out this is George Agaronovs 2nd album and I need to say its quite something!

 

The sound is pretty dry, ascetic even; very pristinely produced and consisting primarily of rolling basslines, atmospheric sound effects / trickery, atonal blips & blops and lots of classic Nord Lead screeches, farts and acid squelches. Normally, this kind of music gets boring pretty quickly, but this one is different - it is very playful, cheerful and funky and isnt afraid to venture out of the safe dark-psy cocoon into the more melodic, musical excursions: tracks like "Koala", "Overtones", "Thriller", "Timeless" or final 3rd of "Cookie" are immediately catchy by providing a gentle contrast to the otherwise relentless electronic beats, with the melodic backbone clearly growing organically from within the tracks as opposed to being shoehorned as an afterthought... Its obvious George has a lot of fun writing this music, which you can hear in their homage to classic electronic pioneers of Yello (in "Yello Blast") but also feels comfortable in baroque, ghost-in-the-opera Talpa-like "Spleen Romance".

 

It's difficult to provide just one reference here, but one will find influences and similarities to Ocelot's "9 Lives", GoW & Metaloids "Tits On Fire", early Talpa / Infected Mushroom and - not kidding here - Hux Flux' seminal Cryptic Crunch. Its perhaps not as consistent or revolutionary as those album were, but nevertheless it's all in there and it is very good. There's no huge, sweeping melodic passages, no hands-in-the-air moments, but if - like me - you can fall in love with an 8 minute track only because it has this perfect 20 seconds part where it all suddenly clicks together, then please give it a chance.

 

4/5

 

Review by Antic (posted here at his request)

[Starkraver]

(posted here at his request)

Please ask him to forget what happened and return to psynews.

Thanks for the review. Will check it out for sure.