Southern Outpost

A little late and a little short (we’ll have to remember the lead times for promos to print magazines), the following review appeared in August 2008 edition of WIRE:

Bvdub Monuments To Oblivion
Australian expatriates, well versed in Detroit dub Techno, spitting out chunks of very abstract sound. When the beat pops up it’s like having an ass nailed to your forehead, but some people like that sort of thing. Right?

A slightly weird review, but we’ll take anything we can get ;)

Taken from Die Ablenkung:

I hauled out my crusty old walkman for the cassette tape of this part of the package. And after some initial skepticism, found it hard to resist this blatently nostalgiac appeal. The lo-fi loveliness – hissing tape noise and clunking buttons – was as tactile and retro as you’d imagine, but with soundscapes that flip you into a fantasy of a different order.

Taken from The Every Album Project

Still not totally sure about “Panopticon” though I will say it is growing on me. But the flip side “Tears For A Fall Empire” is a thunderous bit of music that is beautifully dark and deep as hell. Worth having shipped over from the UK…

Seb from Cyclic Defrost has writen a review of bvdub’s ep “monuments to oblivion”. Posted here for all to see:

Ex-Sydney label Southern Outpost relocated to San Francisco just over a year ago but everyone knows their spiritual home has always been Detroit. bvdub’s first release for the label arrived on audio cassette containing four tracks, two of which also have release on 12″.

First it was a challenge to find a tape deck to play this back on. I had to pull several boxes out of deep storage to find my old 3 head Sony deck. And to my surprise, cassettes sound frightfully good for what they are – I think most of us have forgotten that if they were made properly and played on a decent rig then they could be quite good, especially compared to the flatness of mid-quality MP3.

I’m sure that’s part of the story behind this release because as the tape spooled over the dusty heads, bvdub’s 4 ten-minute plus epics of warm, gaseous dubbed out Detroit techno were filled with even more hiss, static, and flutter as a result of the cassette medium. Much like a faded photo the effect of the cassette medium on the muted kicks and plangent synths adds a degree of melancholy and age to the listening experience. The Side A tracks meander on jerky rhythms and clouds of synth delay. Side B’s ‘Tears for a Fallen Empire’ and ‘Gone are the Days’ bubble along on rubbery analogue bass and straight techno kicks, and are the pick of the four.

There’s little new here – but that’s exactly the point – just top quality Detroit influenced dub techno in the vein of contemporaries Deepchord and Echospace. It is even worth digging out your cassette deck to listen.

Totally missed this review taken from German magazine, Groove.de:

Scape One alias Kurt Baggaley ist einer der herausragenden britischen Electro-Producer, man kennt ihn von Releases auf SCSI-AV, Emoticon oder Science City. Die genretypisch düsteren Tracks sind sehr originell aufgebaut: „Cosmic Waves“ verzichtet ganz auf eine Hookline, Melodien sind allenfalls im Bass anzutreffen, in den höheren Frequenzen gibt es ein Fiepsen und Pfeifen, das einen Bezugspunkt zu Drexciya herstellt. Der Track realisiert die Vision einer Musik, die ganz aus den Geräuschen der Maschinenparks einer industriellen Welt zusammengesetzt ist. „The Star Fraction“ ist freundlicher, die Claps und Cowbells der 808 erzeugen eine gewisse Milde. Dcast Dynamics ist ein neues Pseudonym von Shad T. Scott aus Miami, der besonders als Gosub mit Releases auf Labels wie Isophlux, Frustrated Funk oder Kondi bekannt geworden ist. Die Tracks brechen das fest gefügte Trackschema von Electro auf: Die Grooves werden linearer und fließender, entwickeln fast so etwas wie einen minimalen Charme, die Synthie-Figuren erzeugen eine in diesem Zusammenhang überraschende Trippigkeit, die Sounds sind ganz weit draußen und wunderschön. Nicht nur für Fans des Electro-Genres ergiebige Tracks.