The Rubber Room column is a weekly look at recent and notable releases that don’t fall into the rubric of traditional reviewed material—namely 7”’s, 12”’s, 3” CDs, EPs, cassette-only, DVDs and MP3-only releases.

J.O.Y.
Sunplus 12”
[DFA, 2004]

J.O.Y. consists of Japanese beatheads K.U.D.O. (Major Force West, Skylab, UNKLE when they were good) and Kan Takagi (also formerly of Major Force), both of whom have past experience working with DFA majordomo Tim Goldsworthy during his Mo Wax/David Holmes days. For their debut single, J.O.Y. also add the talents of Yoshimi P-We of the Boredoms/OOIOO. As a result, "Sunplus" (originally released on Ape Sounds in Japan earlier this year) is a twisting garage-rock-style beatdown, densely layered with guitars and drums and squonky noises and more grooves than perhaps it needs (not to mention lots of Yoko-style female warbling). This point is accentuated by the superior stripped-down and sinister DFA remix on the flip where the pulse is thumpier, the guitars scratchier and everything is given more room to breathe.
[Todd Hutlock]

Kim Hiorthøy
Hopeness
[Smalltown Supersound, 2004]

Hiorthøy is highly regarded for his Rune Grammofon design work but his 2000 debut album Hei and the 2002 odds’n’sodds collection Melke showed him to be a credible musical force too. His latest, the half-hour EP Hopeness, features five hi-fi/lo-fi excursions whose innocence and charm recall Múm (sans vocals) and Lullatone. Hiorthøy wisely offsets his songs’ sunny melodic glimmerings with punchy drum patterns that are by turns funk-inflected (“Mandarinerna”), fulminating (“Soliga Dagens Släppiga Trosor”), and, on the eleven-minute “You Know The Score,” almost belligerent. Here and elsewhere the pitter-patter of burbling keyboards weaves in and around the beats, supplemented by the exotic flavouring of an occasional Scandinavian voice sample.
[Ron Schepper]

Daedelus
Something Bells
[Plug Research, 2004]

Daedelus’s latest 12” offers radical overhauls of three Of Snowdonia songs. “Something Bells” gets three versions (two instrumental and the third a backdrop for some rapid-fire riffing from Busdriver and Pigeon John), all of which wisely retain the song’s buoyant splendour and candy-coated jubilance. Bolstered by an impassioned chorus of rabid voices and frenetic beats, the song’s yearning melody of glistening stutters sparkles throughout all three. Elsewhere, Busdriver raps over tumbling beats in “Was Waiting” while, less successfully, Subtitle’s “Dumbfound” remix reduces the original to a hallucinatory blur. The disc’s peak, though, is the deep clanking-and-whirring funk mix of “Dumbfound” by Planet µ’s edIT. Something Bells is distinguished most of all by the surprising twists Daedelus’s guests add to the songs.
[Ron Schepper]

Ammon Contact
Brothers From Another
[Plug Research, 2004]

With Brothers From Another, Fabian Ammon and Carlos Niño publish the next chapter of the Ammon Contact experience. Carrying on from last year’s Sounds Like Everything, the group drops eight head-nodders whose grooves lope and lumber alongside warbling bass lines, subtle percussion flavourings, and minimal melodic sprinkles. Mixing hiphop, soul, and jazz, tracks like the slinky “Blue Sky, Purple Clouds And Thunder” and the funked-up “For Super Sound” restlessly flit from one style to another, but Anthony Valadez’s megamix treatment pushes the idea to the extreme on “Positive Contact” where Sol Uprising’s flow alternates with sweet soul-funk by an (unidentified) female singer. In spite of its brevity, Brothers From Another bodes well for the group’s upcoming full-length One In An Infinity Of Ways.
[Ron Schepper]

V.L.A.D.
Xiringuitos Perdido
[Laboratory Instinct, 2004]

At a mere eleven minutes, Xiringuitos Perdido is truly single-length but there’s not a wasted moment in these intricate, often manic tracks. A self-confessed devotee of ‘80s synth and video game sounds, V.L.A.D.’s electro style would be equally at home on Rephlex or Suction. He showers “Futurismo Rodriguez” with morphing voices and delirious game-boy electro-synths, and fills the equally brief “Stringvaderz” with Nintendo sounds and rubbery bass lines. Darker in tone and more contemporary in style, “Furbymix” pairs slamming disco beats with grating elephantine squeals and plinking keyboard melodies that dance above the heavy beats. Like a roller coaster ride, Xiringuitos Perdido doesn’t last long yet still leaves you spinning from its whirlwind of activity.
[Ron Schepper]

Adventure Time
Glass Bottom Boats
[Plug Research, 2004]

Peering through the boat’s glass bottom finds Adventure Time (Daedelus and Frosty) drawn to darker depths and alien life-forms. In contrast to the spirited Dreams of Water Themes original, Nobody gives “Whetting Whistles” a curdling illbient mix with Pigeon John and Ellay Khule’s voices slowed to a creepy crawl; Nobody’s instrumental version exchanges lurching beats for a swaying dub groove. Similarly, Caural discards the jazzy dimension of the original “Kappabashi” for a murkier mix. In the new tracks, Latin rhythms dominate the hallucinatory “Basil Bossy Never,” while “Crazy, Crazy Like A Fox (Adventure Time’s Seafoam Flip)” implodes with mercurial snatches of Coltranesque jazz, gospel, and funk. Prepare for lift-off as, apparently, Adventure Time’s next trip is to the deep reaches of space.
[Ron Schepper]

Scenic Railroads
We’re Serious
[Gameboy, 2004]

Shiflet’s fly-by-the-seat and Panzer’s ultra-careful competing dynamics somehow have coalesced, at times uneasily, to craft an uncompromising forty-three minute work that should perk the ears of the noise/eai crowd. While it’s hard to say what it sounds like, crystalline washes of synthetic decay, bass wobble and sine wave, pure digital mulching, a Mattin-level momentary freak-out or straws sucking up every last smidgen of sound in world are all surface-level descriptions of one sound from every one of the tracks here, it’s easy to say that it’s a CD-R worth owning for the five years it’ll take to disintegrate. A great debut.
[Todd Burns]