Grab the tequila -- it's mommy time. The strange, fax-warping alter ego of Ache Records honcho Andy Dixon, Secret Mommy specializes in music made by machines using humans, or some combination thereof.
Very Rec is short for "very recreational"; what Dixon has done here is posit an after-work response to Matthew Herbert's
Plat du Jour -- a dozen songs crafted at various recreational facilities using minimal technology and loads of field recordings. This may sound like utter pap, but the results are surprisingly vivid -- an assortment of tropicalia-tinged gabber-glitchcore tracks with titles like "Dojo", "Yoga Studio" and "Tennis Court", all of them focused on getting your extracurricular swerve on.
The album is surprisingly placid by gabber standards, with lolloping beats that duck and weave like an aging prizefighter, while the actual source recordings -- ballerinas, hockey players, karate students and swimmers -- crowds around the breaks like onlookers at a pillow fight accident. "Squash Court" and "Daycare", assembled from a dizzying array of frantic sounds germane to their respective titles, are particularly intriguing, suffused with a dreamy but familiar ambiance. Even the usually pedestrian sounds of a "Basketball Court" or a "Weight Room" are given new life here -- processed, clipped and edited into workaday symphonies of toil and triumph.
One of the reasons we look to musicians is to watch them transform the mundane into the extraordinary -- a trick that Very Rec pulls off with particular aplomb.
