Deepblak US Schallplatten & CDs

Review: As Afrikan Sciences, Eric Porter has been pushing his own brand of freeform sonic experimentation incorporating elements and ideas from soul, jazz, broken beat and house in an abstracted manner that veers far off-grid. Far from prolific, Porter's project does share a close bond with the Deepblak label run by Aybee, who have issued all Afrikan Sciences material to date. With whispers of Afrikan Sciences material surfacing on PAN, Porter graces Deep Blak with a wonderfully unique second album entitled Theta Wave Brain Sync. Manipulating rhythm in a manner that's already quite hypnotic and meditative, the eleven tracks live up to Deepblak's billing that it will "let you go as deep, and far as you desire" and then some!

Review: Some five years after it was released digitally, Aybee's Deepblak label revisit the wonderful Afrikan Sciences LP Means &Ways to grant it a double LP vinyl edition. For those unfamiliar with the album, the 11-track set showed Eric Porter refusing to stand still, variously touching on polyrhythmic IDM, dusty jazz-hop, dense post-techno wonkiness, hard-to-pigeonhole madness (see "Alpha Male Syndrum"), sparkling aural experiments ("Ways & Means"), and pleasingly off-kilter dancefloor fare. Amongst this category you'll find deliberately out-of-time deepness, slipped broken beat, and dense drum workouts ("NanoRock Skank"). As usual, Porter's tunes are bizarre but brilliant.

Review: With his many achievements in the field of true, critical deep house, Aybee has no need to remind anyone just what kind of imagination he has when it comes to crafting music, but he does just that on his latest LP Worlds. Just look to a track like "Landing", which shudders on some alien groove that's part jungle, part broken beat, and all sci-fi. Likewise "Moon's Whisper" plots an unknown course through galaxies of pads, and "What Is" equally revels in a cluster of starry chimes and tones. This is without a doubt an album of cosmic magnitude, carrying the futuristic torch that was passed on from the true techno fundamentalists and taking it somewhere fresh.

Review: While Armon "Aybee" Bazile is renowned for the consistent high quality of his 12" singles, he often saves his more interesting material for full-length outings. It's perhaps unsurprising, then, that his latest album - his fourth in total - is packed full of evocative, left-of-centre fare. While The Odyssey does contain a number of straight-up techno cuts - see "Down By The Rabbit Hole", the Drexciya-ish "The Professor", and wonderfully deep and spacey "Island In The Sky" - it also boasts a number of intriguing diversions. Check, in particular, the cloudy ambience of sublime opener "Embryo", the IDM-goes-jazz brilliance of "Asteroid Lust", and the trippy, slightly foreboding electronic epic that is "Man and Machine".

Review: With the spirit of Miles Davis as their guide and an ever-faithful commitment to futuristic advancements in electronic music, Aybee and Afrikan Sciences present an album that brings together three years worth of improvisational studio jams and it's sure to set alight the minds of all cosmic voyagers out there. The three-part "Deep East Suite" starts in a manic mood before diverging into deep meditative ruminations, while "K-Fetisch 1" takes you on a more snaking and nerve-tingling journey. With many different twists and turns it's not a record for the casual listener, but anyone that digs the breaking down of conventional barriers will find a whole lot of worth in time spent travelling with this pair of astronauts.