HIEROGLYPHIC BEING Schallplatten & CDs

Review: Jamal Moss aka Hieroglyphic Being is one of the most fearless experimentalists in house and techno. He confronts dancefloor disillusionment head-on with Dance Music 4 Bad People, his raw, uncompromising debut for Smalltown Supersound. A veteran of Chicago's club scene, Moss channels four decades of history, highs, lows and trauma into an album that defies escapism. These are not crowd-pleasers but cathartic confrontations dense with abrasive synths, molten drum loops and uneasy textures which all crash together in chaotic, transcendent layers. There's no clean resolution anywhere, instead just tension, dissonance and moments of stark beauty. Far from a nostalgic Windy City love-in, Moss' music reflects a dance culture in crisis and provides a place to rage against it.

Review: The inimitable Jamal Moss comes forth with his second offering for Madrid's Apnea records. 'The Moon Dance' unfurls over 11 tracks- in turns pensive, elegiac, and slammin'. Between the sedate expanse of opener 'When The Earths Shadow Falls On The Moon' and the final cymbal strokes of gauche, machine funk closer 'Mawu', Moss lifts us on yet another Afrofuturist space flight of fancy, passing through superclusters of deep house, tactile techno and stroboscopic piano jams along the way.
Standout moments include the smoove-as-u-like-it intergalactic lounge jazz diversion 'The Moondance Moon Walk Version'; its steezy stride-piano vamp seamlessly intertwining with Moss' signature babbling acid intrusions, the irresistibly groovy bump of 'Tethered 2 The Divinely Spaces With In' and the hypnotic sway of 'Celestial Poems Of The Lady With 10000 Names', which opens up from Terrence Dixon-esque introspection into broad windy city string washes and synapse-tickling bleeps. With this collection, Moss pens yet another crucial chapter in the seemingly bottomless hieroglyphic being scroll. While 'The Moon Dance' is one of his most accessible and harmonious works to date, it doesn't lose an ounce of the rawness and immediacy of his previous work. Essential listening!

Review: Hats off to Jamal Moss for the tongue-in-cheek title of his latest album as Hieroglyphic being, which is naturally another pleasingly wild, freewheeling, imaginative and out-there excursion in his now trademark style. It sees him sprint between mutant electronic jazz ('Circumploar'), out-there analogue techno ('21 Days'), organ-rich post-beatdown chuggers ('Foreboding Self Pleasure'), reverb-laden ambient soundscapes ('A Dream Within a Dream', 'Delta Opus L'), industrial-strength dancefloor weirdness ('The Prograde Direction'), sub-heavy lo-fi deep house ('Black Love On An Early Sunday Morning'), sparse electronic future funk ('Future Shocked'), and jacking, sci-fi seeped brilliance ('The Andromeda Strain'). In other words, it's another excellent collection from one of dance music's genuine geniuses.

Review: Chicago extraordinaire Jamal Moss aka Hieroglyphic Being's third solo album is titled There Is No Acid In This House, and sees him return to Soul Jazz Records. Using his idiosyncratic electronic sound, Moss takes influence from the experimental minds of fellow Windy City innovators such as The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, The Art Ensemble of Chicago and Sun Ra, through to icons of his hometown's house music scene like Ron Hardy, Marshall Jefferson, Lil Louis and others who have defined Chicago's musical universe over the last half a century.

Review: Mother Tongue's 'Yellow Jackets' series is wilfully eclectic, meaning second-guessing what will be on the next release is nigh-on impossible, but undeniably essential. Put simply, each EP in the series so far has been nigh on essential. Happily, volume five is superb too. On side A, Detroit scene stalwart Marcellus Pittman does a superb job of reworking a cult classic - Belgian outfit Arbeit Adelt's 1983 post-punk masterpiece 'Death Disco'. His resultant re-edit emphasises the track's weighty, low-slung groove, mind-mangling electronics and weirdo noises, extending the intro and outro to allow DJs to ride the mix. Over on side B, Chicagoan genius Jamal Moss dons the Hieroglyphic Being guise and offers up a sublime slab of intergalactic excellence, peppering a deep, shuffling, distorted rhythm track with spacey electronics and shimmering, star-gazing melodies.

Review: There is a ton of sonic scuzz and frosty electronic texture to both cuts on this new limited 12" from Natural Sciences. And that is frankly to be expected when you are dealing with these two artists - the long-time LIEs associate Beau Wanzer goes first with the fucked up drums and gnarly synths, wiry electronics and dark vocal mutterings of 'The Table Scrap'. On the flip is Chicago noise specialist Hieroglyphic Being with 'This Is The Right Time In Human History 2 Be Stupid.' It's a lo-fi and fuzzy world of busted drum loops and anxious synths.