music review:

Igloo & the Icycles"Strange News from Another Star"

electro-beat-ambient

If you dig early Aphex Twins (like the ambient collections), the mellower work by Black Lung or Coil, the early instrumental Kraftwerk (like the Autobahn album) and even Autechre, then you'll dig this. This is a custom burnt CDR release with17 tracks of electro-ambience spread over 73 minutes. It even has a colour jacket too! The songs were recorded between 1996-1999.

Overall the sound is fairly minimal and characterised by transient string keyboards filtering in and out of the mix like ghosts, mellow plonking electro-drums, sci-fi synth noises, sparse and occasional dialogue samples which sometimes have subtle political messages but are mostly used to theatrically accent the tone of a piece. This could be summed up as "sound-track" music.

My favourite pieces are the ghostly "Twist" and "Anter"; "DSA5" with it's swooping bass lines; "hope" with it's echoing synth-percussions and anti-vivisection samples as well as some samples from the "Ezy Rider" film I think; "B10" which is quite disturbing - mellow cheerful slow drums, minimal lounge keyboards and subtley modulating 303 synth-bass overlaid with samples from the film "Hidden Crimes" - the dialogue is of totally desensitised animal researchers laughing at and making jokes about their monkey subjects - who are far from impressed (if you see the video); and "water" with it's minimal tribal percussion lines and retro 80s digital synth noises overlaid with sci-fi insect sounds and of course, bubbling stream sounds.

$5 Aust. care of Blatant Propaganda:

PO Box 1327 Woden ACT 2606 Australia.l

E-mail: [email protected]

http://www.freespeech.org/ledland/IglooAndTheIcicles/IglooAndTheIcicles.html