Artifact: Perspectives

Varied remix album of STS9, a band who makes organic feeling, electronic sounding songs with traditional rock instrumentation. These remixes touch on hip-hop, glitch, dub & DnB. This album feels less organic. lounge-y, and earthy than most straight-up STS9 albums, but is significantly more active, uptempo and engaging. Artifact was a pretty disappointing release, and this infuses it with a lot of life. A lot of this would make good music for a movie where robots get souls. Tracks 3, 10 & 14 are straight up hip-hop. 11 is a long survey of the STS9 sound. FCC Clean. Picks: 2, 8, 9, 10, 13.

-David Blackman (Wicked Child)

1. Bass heavy, lounge vocals. Ends with a minute of sweet acoustic guitars.
***2. Twinkly intro with animal noises. Glitchy middle. Catchy looping guitar riff.
3. Hip-hop vocals, minimal piano melody. Deep female chorus. Harmonizing call & response.
4. Starts tribal, ends pure drum & bass, heavy beats, very light standard ethereal female vocals.
5. Chill, down-tempo, glitchy, "splooshy" beats, beep-beep noises. Gets very quiet ~3:30, watery sound.
**6. Sounds like the music to a deranged, but not sinister circus fun-house. Operatic organ over popping backbeat.
7. Soulful female vocal over drum machine, sparsest arrangement of this song.
**8. Angular beats, bubbling/building feel. The sound of a robot dance in a swamp.
****9. Good mix of everything on this album, hard beats, hopeful/building feel, with some glitch & DnB influences, ends with organic guitars
***10. B-Boy hip-hop fast vocals, better take on #3.
11. *long* tour of all things sts9, organic tribal/ambient for a while, random crushing distorted beats. Really cool mournful guitar.
12. Short, dub track.
***13. Danceable fun DnB. Occasional sunrise feel Karsh Kale is so good at. Rushing, fast.
14. Dark hip-hop (Jay-Z sounding vocals), some scratching. Very 80s beats. Fake-out ending with 80s computer voice ~3:40.
15. Generic, but good, lush spacey track. Ends ~4:00, with 20s of silence.