Antediluvian Rocking Horse
Music for the Odd Occasion
PSY-Harmonics/Seeland (CD)
Samplers can do wonderful things. Don't believe me? Crank up Music for the Odd Occasion and hear the amazing variety of rhythms and sounds that ARH have created from random vocal snippets, bits of noise and old songs. It's disarming, distracting and utterly brilliant. Antediluvian Rocking Horse are two parts Greater Than One (whose late-eighties dense, sample-driven music foreshadows this disc), one part Negativland (with whom they share a stateside label) and a little bit of Orb for good measure. The music is ear-popping, a listener's paradise of eccentric little samples that also happens to be capable of igniting any right-minded dance floor in a matter of seconds. There's something here for every portion of your oh-so-discriminating musical palate -- odd electronic squeals, eccentric breakbeats, rhythms built from the eccentricities of a looped vocal sample, insane inhuman cackling, cheesy seventies music loops, out-of-context bits of television and radio dialogue, thundering electronic beats, lengthy "voice collages" ... the list could go on for pages. You'll love "Abnormal Recovery", "Rigorous Doughnut" and "The Rhythm Sticks", thrill to the Nelson Dennified-techno of "Ratus Sapiens", be energized by "Lather, Rinse, Repeat" and drift away to "Fingerbone". As Paul of ADH puts it, "This is good bent chill out stuff", though you may be too fascinated to chill. -- george zahora