From Iceland — A Reference Free Review

A Reference Free Review

Published October 14, 2011

A Reference Free Review

This is a namedrop and reference free review. Just for the hell of it I won‘t mention any styles nor any artist names other then the ones on the bill.

Hazar

“I’m Hazar and I’m going to rock out for half an hour!” And he did. And so did we. He has an interesting take on beat. It’s like he makes them follow the bassline and the distorted frequency swirls rather then the other way around. I like that. It tells me that he tries to approach the already-done in a new way and succeeds. From time to time he threw in some smart poetry samples while sticking the bass heavy beat in our faces, but the whole time we all watched a electronic musician who dared to have fun with his music. Here’s definitely a man with a healthy dosage of swag. I thoroughly enjoyed his set; it was my favourite of the bill that night.

Muted

Muted started out with a half muffled bassline that progressed to be an aggressive bass drone assault. But a warm assault, the kind that you willingly surrender too. An excellent tune.

Then it got kind of lounge-y for a while. But it was when he was playing one of the haunting tunes with a dreamy girl vocal when I realized I wasn’t listening to anything but this masterfully crafted bass drone that kept coming up through out his set. But then he lounged again. I really don’t care for that. It always feels like the song isn’t going anywhere and just is until it’s time to end the song and the only way to end a song like that is letting it fade out. Which he did. The tribal beat and aforementioned bass drone almost salvaged next lounge number but only almost and at this point I was losing interest.

Muted has some good tunes but he gets same-y when he chills out.

Subminimal

Pretty basic variations to the amen beat with accompanying synthscapes featuring an occasional distorting of the beats. But. I guess the divine is in the details because that’s where things were happening. The sutle twists to the well known slowly progressed from being a tiny glow to shining star of every tune. It’s all stuff that I’ve heard before, but it doesn’t get boring.

Natasha Fox

Again pretty basic four to the floor but manages to dish out some freshness in between. But is it enough? Is it justifiable to stick to the lowest common dance denominator if you keep spicing it up with something new? Subminimal did it by revealing the spice as the main ingredient but Natasha blew some fresh scents through the speakers that made me  feel I never got to taste the source. It’s good to dance to, but what isn’t with this kind of beat? And despite those hints of freshness the vocal samples were so predictable in both placement and theme that the whole set ran the risk of becoming annoying.

And then Sindri came, we exchanged greetings and a misunderstanding regarding my beer and I was off.

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