Our local electronic music scene has been picking up momentum over the past year or so with noticeable help from Fred Toon’s Psychotechnic League and Space Heroes of The People’s Modernist Disco promotions, and while Coloureds, Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs and the now defunct Keyboard Choir have been flying the flag out of town a few less prominent long-time home-studio tinkerers are stepping out of the wings as well, with a logical companionship and apparent shared nostalgia emerging between Fred Toon’s various guises and former Witches guitarist Dan Burt’s Kinetic Wardrobe project. Both musicians hark back to the early-to-mid 1990s, when electronic music-making technology rapidly became cheaper and more powerful, and rekindle memories of the music from those times in different ways.

Toon’s Last Years Man project is a collection of loop-based audio sketches, generally well under the three minute mark, which show promise but don’t seem quite developed enough to face the world yet. The most complete track is probably ‘In-To-Rim’ which, with its bleepy synths over simple electronic beats, feels like it could turn into a dancefloor thumper with a bit more spit-and-polish on the production; it picks up when the fuller beats arrive but within thirty seconds the track has ended in an awkward fade-out. There are nods to Pole and Four Tet on ‘Puresandos’ and an Orb-esque dub feel to ‘Can’t Finish’ (which, appropriately enough, doesn’t really develop and flumps to an unsatisfying conclusion) and a few 90s electronica tropes raise their heads: cut-up speech samples in ‘What Do I Do With All The Flowers’, and a ‘hidden track’ burst of speech half a minute after the end of ‘Puresandos’, a gag which is ruined on Soundcloud where you can see the waveform of the track and count down to the ‘surprise’. It’s promising stuff, but these are personal experiments not cultural ones, and it’s too clearly work in progress to stand repeated listening. There are a few kernels which could be turned into engaging tracks, but more work is needed to determine whether these tracks are aimed for the dancefloor (in which case the production needs to be cleaner and the beats harder) or for home listening (where more development of the ideas would be needed).

The Kinetic Wardrobe‘s set, however, is a recording of a set performed earlier this year and therefore clearly intended to be a club set – though as with Last Year’s Man it doesn’t seem to be constructed to get a club dancefloor moving. Throughout, there is a debt to ‘brown album’-era Orbital and pre-1994 Aphex Twin, both excellent sources from which to borrow, and in the main Burt has done so very effectively while adding touches of his own. Fuck-Buttons-esque intro ‘No More Lies, Only Truth’ is a short and simple but effective opener, setting an air of potential menace which leads into ‘Prism’, a neatly building loop of three-time lead synths and more interesting rhythm arrangement than a straight four-to-the-floor house beat. Like the loop-based electronica of the Warp ‘listening music’ series, the tracks don’t seem to be changing much as they go along but there is enough subtle tweaking to stop it getting dull. The tracks build well and the combination of diverse rhythm programming and strong melodic content make for a solid, engaging and very listenable set, though the lightness of the production and the obvious breaks between tracks prevent it becoming the club set it purports to be. High points include ‘Cuckoo Spit’, where the production seems to move furthest from its influences, particularly coming after the less appealing Duncan Idaho remix of ‘Ghola’ whose mock harpsichord over dubstep-lite beats is just too… lite. Overall, the melodic elements are probably the Kinetic Wardrobe’s greatest strength, and the rhythms are also very nicely put together, but the production and mix would benefit from sharpening to give it more dancefloor-friendly punch.

Fred Toon’s We Are Ugly But We Have The Music project is squarely aimed at the aforementioned dancefloor, and the ‘Communications of Falsehoods’ EP dives straight in with bleeping leads and thumping drums, with scarcely a minute gone before we have cheesy rave chords to boot. Like Kinetic Wardrobe this is nostalgic stuff – no bad thing, on its own – but the production, particularly the synth sounds, seem to be less polished than that of the Wardrobe. The EP is structured more as a continuous mix than the Kinetic Wardrobe set, if less pleasingly so; the tracks flow together better but the quality of the set is more front-loaded, and once we’re a few tracks in it does begin to drift. Again, it’s the production that lets it down; if you’re going to have a track named ‘Taste of Acid’ you really need a TB-303, and while the synth leads are squelchy there’s none of the hallmark 303 resonance or distortion to give that Josh Wink bite, all of which keeps the pH from falling any lower than about five. ‘Cirrhosis of The Brain’ shows a similar aesthetic to Space Heroes Of The People: speech samples pushing an atheistic agenda over a fairly straightforward bed, but replacing Space Heroes’ harder drums with nicely weaving high lead synth parts; it’s a softer track than others on the EP but the melodic steadiness makes it a standout track. From there it’s ‘Field of Fear’, in which a fairly flat rhythm part is laid under synth lines that don’t quite mesh together to form a track which sounds rather like a Casio workstation’s demo track, and final track ‘Bulls Fighting’ broods well but loses its way before a fairly abrupt conclusion. There are good moments for hand-waving – or head-nodding, on quieter speakers – in this set, even though it trails off noticeably through the second half. The whole set is more coherent than the Kinetic Wardrobe offering, though the latter is better paced over its half-hour running time and has more melodic and rhythmic variety to sustain interest.

Overall then we have two very promising acts whose future probably depends on the extent to which they’re side projects: navel-gazing home experiments at one end of the scale, club-friendly techno/rave/electronica at the other. Fingers crossed…

Last Years Man / We Are Ugly But We Have The Music / The Kinetic Wardrobe