SHIN.E

LIGHT YEARS

  1/  Grid                                                                     7.41
  2/  Transparent                                                              6.39
  3/  Solitude                                                                 6.40
  4/  Interwoven                                                               6.20
  5/  Vector                                                                   6.22
  6/  Vertical                                                                 6.18
  7/  Accelerate                                                               7.07
  8/  Impact                                                                   5.55
  9/  Between                                                                  5.08
  10/ Erratum                                                                  6.37

          Created at Orange Music Studio, West Orange, New Jersey
          Engineered by Robert Musso
          Assistant: James Dellatacoma
          Additional recording at Texture Studio, Tokyo 
          Produced by Bill Laswell 
          Mastered by Michael Fossenkemper at Turtle Tone Studios, NYC
          Art/Photos/Design: John Brown at Cloud Chamber 
          Prefabrication: Shin Terai for Texture Inc. 
          Texture Inc: Mika Kii

Nils Petter Molvaer: trumpet, electronics; Buckethead: guitar; Bernie Worrell: keyboard; Gigi: vocal; Aman Laswell: voice; Karl Berger: material strings; Lili Haydn: violin; Bill Laswell: bass, electronics; DXT: turntables; Shin Terai: beat construction.

          2007 - ION Records, (USA), ION 2021 (CD)

REVIEWS :

Crooked film score doesn’t work very well off the screen, however. These sounds are widely uneventful and suffer without the film’s images giving them dimension. That said, "Zen’s Theme" by Bill Laswell does work extraordinarily, even if the other companions on this 23-track score do not. It’s a weird and funky bad-ass theme song with a guitar line that evokes plenty of mood and a crying trumpet sure to break any heart it encounters through its careening melancholy.

There are a few sparse moments that do glide through without the need of imagery, sounds that run the gamut between foggy and sinister to evil hip-hop backbeats that funk things up even while dipping a listener right into an aural dread. This is a paradise if one is to take the strong and thick beats and appreciate them without catchy rhythmic hooks or extended song structures. Instead, these are brief urban beats meant to hammer home the mood of a story. And that story ain’t too bad, but it is made all the richer through the work contained here.

Bill Whiting-Mahoney (courtesy of the Techno Punk Music.com website)