Uprock: Jungle Green Memes
Tigerbeat6

Apparently Jungle Green Memes includes “field recordings culled from peep show booths, a scanline synthesized glial cell migration, free jazz mash-ups, … a contact mic'd fixed gear bicycle, and an amplified potato”—and that's only a partial list—and comes with a complementary full-colour booklet of The Aphasia Group's “bitcrumpled photomicroscopy.” If all that has a slightly Matmosian ring to it, so at times does the music. Consider the jittery “Synaptic Plastic” which oozes the same kind of obsessive micro-surgical techno that distinguishes A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure, still the group's most satisfying release. But unlike Matmos, Uprock avoids fashioning the album's content in accordance with some overarching concept (even if song titles provocatively suggest extra-musical connections) and instead opts for a generalized form of skittish, glitchy techno-funk that's got as much to do with Richard Devine and Autechre (or Merzbow in the case of noisier workouts like “The Anatomy of Memory”) as it does the work of Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt; “memetic edit,” for instance, features a pinballing hailstorm of prickly tendrils that one might just as easily encounter on Draft 7.30 while “extra medium is the message” indulges in the kind of intricate, atomistic sound sculpting heard on Lipswitch. Still, while it's always enlightening to learn about source material origins, what ultimately matters is the quality of the tracks. In that regard, Jungle Green Memes is certainly a credible if somewhat derivative exercise in sinewy electronic digitalia.

November 2004