Fuzzion

Black Magic

Boshke Beats

Sometimes reviewers such as the present writer may get all enthusiastic and say, “great album! It’s going straight in my record box / Case Logic / Memory Stick / etc”. Sadly this is seldom true: with Black Magic however, that’s exactly what happened and I subsequently forgot to review it.

Apologies then to you lot, to the label, and most of all to the artist for my missing out on hyping up one of my genuinely favourite albums in recent years.

Distort & Discord does just what it promises to do, a huge lumbering scaremonger of a track with noises so fat they should join Weight Watchers, and Tango De Colour Mango throws in a bit of Finnish, a bit of acid house, and a bit of spaghetti western. Black Magic and C41 are bustling, tight techno from the future, with the latter making wonderful use of discord. The tracks change and shift at every given opportunity – you’re never listening to the same frequencies twice. Frog On The Run is a wonderful, loveable bit of tribal spookcore, with just about the right amount of derangedness balancing against a psychedelic bambaata lead.

Recharge sounds like the inside of a computer on its last legs, Shezabitch is a fine stab at that electro-house-with-bloke-speaking-in-an-accent-over-the-top, both are as deep as they are fun. Next up, things start to get very very special indeed: Yellow Mellow has a certain mid-period-Orbital-ness to it, as though the melodies are bursting to get out from underneath a duvet of noise. It’s staggering and has that air of a timeless bit of electronic music about it.

As does Starfall, a sublime lesson in how simple patterns and melodies can be combined, healthily, into one of the singularly most honest, respectful and fluid wordless love songs ever recorded in the history of anything. This should be number one in the charts, and for so many, many reasons. Little Girl has echoes of the same melodic sensibility, pushed through a blender of progressive house and post-party warehouse techno. And again, is a gorgeous piece of electronic music.

One cheeky remix later (White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane, and it’s good) we’re back into the album proper with Sound Surface – a desolate landscape of sound that would be highly unnerving, if not for the staggering little production tricks he throws in. Finally ICU is a mesmerising little psychedelic gnome to round things off nicely.

Artist albums should be this good: the flow runs from experimental, to shadowy, through to soaringly happy then back out the other side to experimental. This is bloody, bloody good and will appeal to way more people than the sinister packaging might lead you to believe. Put simply: psyreviews wants Fuzzion’s babies.

10