DJ Alex Corton – Vinyl Reviews

Good Looking Records

Blame – Firestorm EP

2001

We now return to the sounds of the future, with the man like Conrad Blame. This EP is the final Good Looking Records release from him, that we’ll be reviewing. His work on the label became the perfect springboard for him, taking his ‘Visions Of Mars’ sounds right up to the music in today’s review, working through these ever evolving portals of discovery. 

    Blame will feature in a lot more reviews, so don’t use too many hankies. We have a ton of his remixes as there’s the label where his career really began blooming. Moving Shadow. I may need to put a different blog up for that. Working with technology for me is sometimes like trying to get the cast of Last of The Summer Wine, to trial for the Olympic Games. An uphill struggle (without hurtling down a hill in a metal bathtub). Not tried that one yet. 

   Artwork for this EP falls back into the hands of Nick Purser. I’m pretty sure you’ve already posted a video up of this piece? I’ll have a dig and add it into this post. The profile pictures of Conrad, with that 3D colour block rendering is a superb touch and that 12 x 24” inside gatefold harks back to the way graphic design programs could weave in the tools that we found so advanced at the time. There’s a real classy feel to this one though and those beige, sand and tan shades pop out next to the black background with that little, three level logo. This translates to the front too, where the small logo has the three brown shades again. Blame’s name in lower case works really nicely too, next to the uppercase ‘FIRESTORM.ep’ text. 

  The four tracks on this EP all feature on Blame’s, Good Looking Records album (GLRMA004), ‘Into The Void’, from 2002, which was the only one of the artist albums to not get pressed on vinyl. This release was really acting as a sampler for that album and provided enough of a tasting session to move forward with purchasing ‘Into The Void’ in an instant. It was really special to have these four pieces of music available to spin on the decks though. 

   Having already bunched a very brief review of the tracks on this album together on the ‘Into The Void’ write up (written in the blog below), it’s now time to dissect and forage a little deeper. ‘Firestorm’ is first up on Side A, generating the static and electrical charges that ignite the particles and extinguish the acidic compounds that burn through the fragile layers of the bruising cold front. Blame presents a sound that at this time, had materialized into this event of bewildering nature. It almost took itself away from the genres we had, creating this sci-fi, technologically advanced system of beats and sounds that matched the pace of drum and bass, but was more a rapid galactic, light year resolution of electronic experimentation during the flight of some unreachable time in the future. 

   For the B Side, the ancient monuments that stand silent in the dense and tropical climates, act as towering shadows in the dawn mists, only releasing their colorfully tiered status as the beams of the low lying sun, strike the faces of these spiritual Goliath’s. ‘Forest Of Pagodas’ catches the orchestral winds in full swing here, as the wisps of that killer bass cement things together. The pipes and bells along with those eerie cello strings bond in this almost religious foray into the magical foresight of Blame. This track is like a Hitchcock of time capsuled experimentation. Music that stretches beyond our understanding, and psychologically puts you in the grips of a doctored balance between the unrequited knowledge and the sordid secrets of the damaged. 

   Blame does it once again. What a blistering set of tracks! 

  My blog is here if you want to catch the ‘Into The Void’ write up, along with this one. It’s all input via catalogue numbers on this site.

     Plate C / D will be up next. Ez all.