Terminal Sound System - Compressor
XCD-057 | CD | 2007 | Release Information
Imagine if Miles Davis, Sepultura and Karlheinz Stockhausen had the opportunity to work their magic on the phenomenon of Drum'n'Bass. It could well have sounded like "Compressor" by TERMINAL SOUND SYSTEM.
Davis often absorbed new styles of music and made them his own. That's exactly what Australian artist Skye Klein, under the guise of TERMINAL SOUND SYSTEM, has achieved with "Compressor".
"The thing I love about Drum'n'Bass is the sounds," explains Skye. "I wanted to escape from the formula that has made the music so predictable". There is no doubt that he has achieved that with "Compressor".
Drum'n'Bass is most obviously about the drums but the bass is also a feature. "Compressor" has a rich sonic texture that does justice to the genre and also acknowledges Squarepusher with reverence.
Skye obviously likes more than just the sounds of Drum'n'Bass. He grew up playing in metal bands and gained his 'metal credentials' in the acclaimed group HALO, a hybrid doom metal band that wasn't afraid to bring the noise! So, it's not surprising that the occasional metal power chord riff finds its way into the mix.
"Compressor" is a creative and confident album that rewrites the possibilities for Drum'n'Bass and playfully shows off its musical influences. It's experimental, it's dynamic and it declares that Skye has a carved out a new sound to repeat his previous success. TERMINAL SOUND SYSTEM has arrived.
XCD-057 | CD | 2007 | Audio Samples
Audio samples are available as lofi (64kbps) streaming mp3s.
XCD-057 | CD | 2007 | Reviews
Textura.org
Terminal Sound System's arresting Compressor often sounds as if Skye Klein's drum'n'bass files got virally infected on their way to the pressing plant, or got dropped into a chemical bath by accident. The Australian sound scientist (also one-time member of doom-metal band Halo) subverts the stereotypical, straight-ahead relentless of the drum'n'bass genre by shattering it into fragments and then re-assembling it in novel, cubistic manner. Klein's approach imaginatively reinvigorates the genre, even though its signifiers aren't banished so much as reconfigured within a newly experimental context; a threatening bass swarm surfaces every now and then, for instance, a firm reminder of the music's origins, and, like much of drum'n'bass, Compressor's dystopic material often oozes menace ("Ghost Summer" writhes like a dying rhino)...
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GAZ-ETA
..What's best about the record is Klein doesn't simply program and assemble these beats as random events. These percussive structures have an actual sense of rhyme and reason to them. With its persistently heavy and obtuse hammer blow, "Ghost Summer" could pass for a latter day Skinny Puppy minus the vocals. "Black Note" has a death metal feel to it [Klein used to play in a black metal band Halo]. With its riveting, stark and ominous beats, this music mines aggressive rather than the sedate...
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Vital Weekly
...With a starting point taken in the drum'n'bass-scene "Terminal Sound System" takes the listener across a great number of impressions and expressions. With breakbeats and buzzing bass drones operating in the sub-levels, mr. Skye, takes everything from technical jazz rhythm-textures and aggressive thrash-like guitar riffs into his spicy soup of sonic complexity. As a metaphysical carpet above, drifting soundscapes of ambient create an excellent touch of nocturnal atmosphere on the album. "Terminal Sound System" brings something new and unexplored into the drum'n'bass-scene, simply by taking his starting point in the glory days of British experimental breakbeat-scientists such as Jacob's Optical Stairway (a.k.a. 4Hero), T-Power and Squarepusher...
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Chain DLK
...just to paint a realistic portrait of this cd, let's say it could have been also out on labels such as Planet Mu, Hefty, Skam or Warp and nobody would be surprised. Top notch electronic music with the usual maniacal attention for single sounds/beats, and for rhythmical structures but...surprise surprise...while this' music is without any doubt "cold", there's an intense and above all "warm", dark feeling that's probably that "common denominator" that lays behind many cds out on Extreme...
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Pop Matters
...Terminal Sound System has its own rigor. And rigor defines this project, from the complex rhythms that fade off the beat or shuffle incessantly to the booming swells of bass...
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Animal PSI
...Reportedly on a mission to redraw the limits of DnB, Skye places all-to-familiar programmed beats in largely unfamiliar rhythms and anti-rhythms (not an easy task, considering the rampant beat-butchery achieved through modern sequencing). The filtered processing of tracks such as break-beat intro "Gridlike" and the bebop of "MI Clatter" creates a greater ambience which transgresses the practicality of so much RPM experimentals, suggesting the accomplished work of Authechre or even hybrids Portishead; to escape the trappings of Electronica and its subsets to recruit listeners in realms so elementally near yet so conceptually far, such breaks are key...
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XCD-057 | CD | 2007 | Liner Notes
composed programmed performed edited rinsed resampled mixed pondered demixed reconstructed by S Klein at (i)=x Melbourne, Australia 2005-6.
guitarkus says stuff on track 2
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