VALIS

VALIS I: THE DESTRUCTION OF SYNTAX

  1/  Ex Machina                                 (Laswell,Showard)             10.08
        Automaton
  2/  Bullit In the Head                         (Showard)                     4.16
        DXT
  3/  Quark Soup                                 (Olive,Loop,Once II)          7.27
        We
  4/  Peace Akhi                                 (Af Next Man Flip)            1.46
        Jungle Brothers
  5/  Backstab (Night of the Long Knives)        (Fernando)                    7.16
        Spectre	
  6/  Senseless Humor                            (Martine)                     4.34
        Corporal Blossom
  7/  Twisted Tables                             (Showard)                     4.55
        DXT
  8/  Night Stalkers/Mayday                      (Fernando)                    5.10
        Spectre
  9/  Conveyor                                   (Martine)                     4.45
        Corporal Blossom
  10/ Journey (Paraspace Mix)                    (Paul Miller)                 4.14
        DJ Spooky
  11/ Prime Order                                (Martine)                     1.53
        Corporal Blossom
  12/ Play To Win                                (Torture)                     3.23
        From the Jungle Approach
  13/ Nasty Data Burst (Why Ask Why?)            (Paul Miller)                 7.20
        DJ Spooky

          Recorded at various studios
          Track 1 produced by Bill Laswell and DXT
          Tracks 2 & 7 produced by DXT
          Track 3 produced by We
          Track 4 produced by the Jungle Brothers, Bill Laswell and Matt Stein
          Tracks 5 and 8 produced by Spectre
          Tracks 6,9 and 11 produced by Layng Martine III
          Tracks 10 and 13 produced by DJ Spooky
          Track 12 produced by Torture
          Compiled and mastered at Greenpoint Studio, Brooklyn, New York
          Engineering: Robert Musso
          Assistant: Layng Martine
          Called down by Bill Laswell
          Subharmonic: Robert Soares
          Material, Inc.: Tracy McKnight
          Axiom: Bill Murphy

Bill Laswell (1): bass, beats; DXT (1,2,7): turntables, beats; DJ Olive, LLoop and Once11 (3): all sounds.

          1995 - Subharmonic (USA), VCD 4400-2 (CD)
          2016 - Bill Laswell Bandcamp (digital only)

Note: Based on the spoken word samples, the track titles on 2 and 7 appear to be reversed.

REVIEWS :

And I thought I wasn't going to find a groovier compilation this year than Certified Dope. Sure enough, though, I start looking for things, see Bill Laswell's label, and my wallet springs forth. More tracks by the Masters of Deep Nasty Dub, with a spattering of Gangsta Jazz thrown in for good measure. I saw another disc by DJ Spooky that same day, but I somehow lost track of it, and now it's gone. Corporal Blossom just rules: if they only had an album, or something... Spectre's a trip too. Subharmonic is domestic, so chances are it can be hunted down and killed with minimal effort.

Dan Foley (courtesy of the Ambience For the Masses website)

..................................................

Valis is bassier, darker and a lot more abstract than "altered beats," which is probably why i like it a hell of a lot more. Automaton sets the tone for the whole thing with "ex machina," a nice combo of dub beats and ambient drones with amorphous noises, bizarre horn sounds and delayed-ed-ed guitar. DXT's "bullit in the head" picks up a bit with some fat synth, metallic beats and severely painful scratching... lots of samples of chaos and anarchic screaming add to the overall assault on your senses. We kicks in with "Quark Soup," which is a pretty amazing composition: a mixture of slow dub with drones, heavy percussion, more disjointed sampling and heavy, stuttering programming - then suddenly it moves into outer space with some oscillators, uh, oscillating and then the track comes back, and somehow it all makes perfect sense. "Achoo." The JBs (the Jungle Brothers? or _the_ JBs?) combine a Naked City sample (i swear! "osaka bondage!") with an aggressive, distorted beat (or my speakers are bad) and some strong cutting and slicing up of tracks that make you want to do some hallucinogens just so you can understand this shit. Spectre's first track "Backstab" mixes Scarface samples ("fuck you, mayn") with tense, low piano chords and an overall gangster feeling to nice effect; his second track combines Psycho shrieks with looped guitar wackness and big, bulbous bass. Well, fuck it, i've gone on long enough, haven't i? DJ Spooky is on this, too, and his tracks are also superior; as a matter of fact, this whole disc is excellent. The last thing i have to mention is the utter godhead of DJ Spooky's "Nasty Data Burst," which is as close to experimental hip-hop as it gets.

grievous (courtesy of the Noise From the Spleen of Space website)