crucial blast
this record was really the one that stood out and being retardedly funny and very non pc inana a indiana lenny bruce kinda way i need ed to copie information i picked my cd up thruought crucial blast and looked it up again and there is one on ebay so someone should take me up on some very ridiculous suggestions.......................
STROTTER INST.
monstranz cd + lathe cut
swiss import
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Recorded by Strotter Inst. and BlindDoc at Stalden, Solothurn.
Mix and Mastering by Hess and D. Plus at Deadbrain Studio, Berne.
Cut by Flo at Vinylium, Grenchen.
Cover by Hess and Meienberg at Tectonics, Berne.
Swiss turntable maestro, Christoph Hess, uses five Lenco turntables and no records to create wonderfully delicate and hypnotic pieces that are easy to get lost in. Track one is lathe cut into the digipak cover and must be played on a turntable!!!!
First off, this debut CD from Swiss turntable outfit STROTTER INST. comes in an amazing little package that actually features the "first" track embossed into the cover of the CD digipack, and is playable on a turntable! First time we've ever seen anything like that. Like fellow turntable deconstructionists Phillip Jeck and Christian Marclay, Strotter Inst. generates all of the music and sounds of Monstranz through the use of manipulated and modified Lenco turntables, without using any prepared samples. The CD begins with a barely audible low-frequency rumble, then a rickety, scraping loop appears followed by epic drones, heavily layered and broken beats, and fragmented, unidentifiable samples and loops. These beats and loops are generated by the earthy crackle of the vinyl grooves and surface noise, and create a complex series of insanely funky polyrhythms, crunchy primitive breakbeats created out of static and white noise and vinyl clicks, pulsating and wheezing and spinning off into eternity. A really neat, trancey album, and Strotter Inst. proves to be a dynamic explorer of abstract turntablism. Monstranz also contains a hyperlinkK to an exclusive song that is downloadablefrom the web.
REVIEW FROM LEENCOM: The concept album offers a journey through the audible world of Strotter Inst. All sounds are generated by manipulated and modified Lenco-turntables without the use of any prepared samples. The CD starts with a lo-fi rumple to change into concrete clicks and scrapes followed by epic drones, multilayered broken beats to fall back in tricky bass-meditations. The bridge between the archaic and the contemporary is also represented in the concept of CD cover: The first track is embossed in the digipak - only playable on a turntable and the last track can only be downloaded from the net. Inbetween aforementioned two tracks, eleven tracks are arranged around a central 33-minutes long polyrhythmic Strotter Inst. composition.
REVIEW FROM SEMTEX: The turntable has to be the greatest instrument ever invented. At least the greatest instrument that was never actually intended to -be- an instrument, or to be -played- at all. What was a revolutionary breakthrough in the playback of popular music, eventually became the ultimate plunderphonic device, with a sonic palette only as limited as your record collection, and then not even limited by that. Broken records, shards of different records glued together, discs made out of wax, or sand paper, or stone, or plastic, or even no records at all, just the sounds of the turntable and the needle. We're not talking DJ's playing records either. Sure we dig that stuff too, but we're talking about people MAKING music out of bits and pieces, scraps and shards, creating whole new worlds of sound. Hard to say what it is exactly about the sound of a needle on vinyl that moves us so, it's warm, and fuzzy, and imperfect, maybe it's the sound of our childhoods, our early musical discoveries, but whatever it is, we love that sound, the whir and hiss, the pop and crackle, for all the striving for pristine perfect digital sound, we can't help but lean in the exact opposite direction, loving our music to be rough and murky, thick with warm warble and rain like static, a hiss that is all age and character and texture.A small group of like minded artists have been exploring the possibilities of the turntable for years, the early experiments of Milan Knizak and his broken music, the grand and gorgeous soundscapes of Phillip Jeck, the vinyl sculptures of Christian Marclay and Martin Tetreault, the rhythmic playfulness of Pierre Bastien, Otomo Yoshihide's turntable explorations in Ground Zero, the minimal compositions of Institut Fuer Feinmotorik, utilizing the runoff grooves, and between song ambience to construct their pieces, and on and on.For over a decade Swiss sound artist Christoph Hess had been experimenting with turntables, tape loops, skipping records, before deciding to jettison any and all music made by other musicians, and instead using just the turntable itself to create sound. Thus was born Strotter Inst. Five customized turntables, each rigged up with pieces of metal, strings and wires, elastic bands, allowed to spin at different RPMs, each turntable contributing a subtle element, creating dense tangled soundscapes of rhythm and texture. Loping and hypnotic, repetitive and mesmerizing. Low rumbling reverberations, slow stuttering twangs, these modified turntables sound remarkably like some sort of long stringed instrument with strings tightened just enough to stay on, but loose enough that they sort of buzz and rumble, pulse and throb. The framework for each track is a sort of lowend turntable riff, the wires and bands and cords are struck and plucked by the revolving turntable, creating slow slithery rhythms, within each a very subtle muted melody, everything slowly morphs and shifts as the various turntables sync up and then drift apart. Imagine the sound of five bass players, all playing simple slow melodies on primitive one string basses, and imagine them playing similar parts, but at slightly different tempos. A slow moving, motorik soundscape of thump and thrum. And around these loping rhythms are soft fuzzy clouds of crackle and hiss, the sound of the needles scraping the surface of the turntables, or skidding across pieces of metal, these contrasting sounds are dense and rich, sounding almost like super distorted vocals at one moment, thick washes of feedback the next. The sound may be simple and subtle, but it's also intense and overwhelming, like Jeck spinning Skullflower, or Marclay armed with only some Mingus bass solo dubplates, or a Tiermes / Bastien soundclash. So dark and mysterious and totally pure and primal sounding. This is SOUND as much as it is music. This is the turntable as musical instrument. This is rhythm and rhythms, this is machine music, but a machine freed from it's shackles, a new instrument, born, loosed, unleashed. Amazing.Amazingly packaged in a die cut cardstock digipak, a large circular hole cut in the front, a smaller hole in the back, so you can see straight through. The front cover has imbedded in it an actual piece of plastic with record grooves etched into it, playable on your turntable! In fact when you listen to the cd you'll notice the first track is all silence, that's because the first track is actually on the sleeve, while the final track is only downloadable from the Strotter website, managing to subtly connect our history of recorded music, a release that is only complete as a record, a cd and an mp3.
