VA: Fork Ends Audio Dregs
[XLR8R]
USA
A sequel to last year's wonderful For Friends comppilation
(get the play on words?), Fork Ends offers a perfect entry point for
those new to Audio Dregs and an exccellent collection for the seasoned
fan. Greg Davis goes spoace pop on the wonderfully titled "Regional
Potato Chips." "Your Castle's Vaporware" proves Nudge
is certainly one of the most overlooked explonents of shoegazer atmospherics.
And Kazumasa Hashimoto's looped bucolia is simply sublime. The most
perfect statement of intent thelabel has produced to date. -Alexis Georgopolos
VA: Fork Ends Audio Dregs
(Grooves) USA
Being so plentiful, it's tempting to slot label comps into categories—leftovers
collection, label manifesto, bald-faced promo ploy—but like most,
Audio Dregs' Fork Ends transcends a single category. All sixteen tracks
are exclusives, so it's not blatantly pushing specific releases from
its catalogue and, in a generous display of communal spirit, guest labels
like Melodic (Baikonour), Kranky (Strategy), and Carpark (Greg Davis)
join Audio Dregs' party, with the result a satisfying hour of bucolic
melodicism and global excursions.
Some artists hew to their established styles while others venture further. The brief African hoedown “Turu Ru Ru” complements the sound of Un caddie renversé dans l'herbe's other releases, and Greg Davis's electric piano oasis and rollicking guitar groove pairing in “Regional Potato Chips” maintains the expansive style of Curling Pond Woods. Some artists add unexpected twists to their contributions. Lullatone's “Bushman's Samba” finds Shawn James Seymour visiting the African outback with a bubbly interweave of percussion and organ. Pairing ostinato piano and glockenspiel patterns with kalimbas and saxophones, Flim's intricate “Donkey Trains” sounds like some Steve Reich-Lullatone-Greg Davis merger. Other highlights include Strategy's burbling patterns and woozy flickers (“Super 80s Future”), E*Rock's flute-flavoured, herky-jerky “Breaking Things and Fixing Them (Again)”, FRZ's firefly weave of sparkling flutter (“Teenage Big Boss”), and Lineland's danceable mélange of buoyant bass and popping drums (“Meriwether”). In addition, there's Nudge's shuddering guitar reverie (“Your Castle's Vaporware”), Honey & Colleen's hallucinatory “Lala Musica,” and Kazumasa Hashimoto's meditative “Ending (Variation).”
Par for the course, a few tracks disappoint. F.S. Blumm's “Bedvanilla
Further,” for example, focuses a bit too much on samples (like
its slowed-down 'Charlie Parker and Strings' “I'll Remember April”
excerpt) and too little on Lichten-styled folktronica. Still, such moments
are rare, making Fork Ends a flattering label portrait and a collection
worth recommending, especially when its contents are so stylistically
wide-ranging.
-Ron Schepper
FORK ENDS
[The Mercury] USA
Painter, musician and record clerk Eric Mast AKA E*Rock always looks
like he just woke up, but his label Audio Dregs is totally on the ball.
Fork Ends
has sixteen unreleased tracks from a Portland-heavy (but tres international)
crew. It’s experimental music made by people equally in love with
melody and invention, highlights provided by Nice Nice, Frz, Lullatone,
Honey & Colleen, Greg Davis and Nudge. Retailing for $6.00, it’s
packed with music that, back when I was a speedball freak, I used to
spend $80.00 a day to hear in my head for maybe five minutes before
I collapsed underneath a park bench. Skittery post-pop lullabies and
lovely dub drones bring to mind that moment in Toy Story when the bad
kid’s recombinant toys come alive: Didac Lagarriga’s “Turu”
sounds like a ballad to outmoded robots, while Lineland’s “Meriwether”
is a funk party thrown by My Little Pony in the year 2525. Huzzah. --Mike
McGonigal
FORK ENDS
[Boomkat] UK
... Audio Dregs seems to have had a bit of a hiatus of late, so its
nice to see them back with another collection of home listening experiments,
bucolic melodicism, and acustic-electric instrumental pop songs with
that dedlicious home-made flavour. F.S. Blumm delivers another gorgeously
strummed soundtrack to the more approachable end of experimentalism,
Greg Davis sinks into a gorgeosuly bittersweet lullaby, Baikonour allow
minimalism and fuzz to warm the coccles while the ever-excellent Nudge
steal the show once again with a sharp descent into glowing audio twilight.
Lovely and incredibly good value.
FORK ENDS
[Loop] CL
This is the second compilation of Portland’s Audio Dregs label,
after "For Friends" released last year. In this comp. we can
find different artists of several imprints like Greg Davis of Carpark,
Flim of Tomlab or Strategy of Kranky, among others and of course there
are E*Rock, Lullatone, E*Vax and Supersprite, active members of the
label. Whereas new names are added that we're going to stand out to
some of them who, along with acoustic/electronic sounds and melodic
pop - which is the characteristic sound of the label, adds an exquisite
mix of ambient and noise music that exposes the Nudge trio [in which
participates to Strategy]; the Honey & Colleen duo [this last with
no relation with the project of French artist Cecile Schott for the
English Leaf label] and the English Baikonour, or the field recordings
of Japanese Kazumasa Hashimoto as a background sound along with a guitar
cords, vibraphone, a sweet flute and the vinyl crackling. The finger
pickering of German Guido Mobius or the magnificent gamelan song of
Brazilian Caddie Renversé Dans L'Herbe. On the other hand, Paul
Dickow, aka Strategy showcases his noise facet with sharp synthesized
guitars on a brilliant track. This is an interesting compilation that
shows new artists who promote avant sounds within experimental pop.
-Guillermo Escudero (September 2004)
