Balinese Beast / Wham Jah - Split LP



The A side starts in gentle silence, suddenly whipped up into a frenzy of erratic electronics, and tone abused obliques, the mood quickly galvanised into a solid spread of DAF heartbeats, all shiny and tight, pulsing out in sexy stretches of PVC with irregular sine abuses. A funnelling/ tunnelling of Meccano moles and atomising dronals, bulking back into a cut up lucky dip of caffeinated spiders. Ilan Manouach and Giorgos Axiotis of Balinese Beast are having plenty of fun here scrambling your expectations with some stark ADHD originality, plying tasty angles glimpsed in cartooned tumbles, spray booth arterials and machine belches. Abstract narratives that dip into easy listening forays, only to be subversively tampered with in Donald Duck like pitch bends and kinetic travesties. Errant fryings of synapse, as the 'no-input scars' mix up approximations of techno, scribbled over with saxophonical Windolene. Roasting things on 'dot to dot' incisings and growling dogs to swoon a dub sensation that bends your ear in a wealth of carnival colour.

The flip is a chunky jam session from Wham Jah tilting into serious Sunburned Hand territory . Burns bright and solid right from that Moroccan dawn offset. A heatstroke of incessant percussion, the sax leaking through the gaps...everything snaking ,growing in 'Flowers of Romance' stutters, back lit in some (really really nice) screaming skull subtleties. Lunges around beautifully, mournfully ecstatic, the pace wavering elastically from the slow burn of expectation to hard splashes of bhangra bone on skin, the noxious smell of burning rubber oozing from the metallics as you drown in those poodle eyes of the cover.

Go grab yourself a copy over at Phase

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