REVIEW: Luke Slater, Freek Funk (Novamute)
- Krisjanis P. Gale
Lock Underworld and Richie Hawtin in a room and let them produce a lovechild. Take away his guilty tendency to twist knobs and encourage him to concentrate instead on producing unique soundscapes, and what you get is quite possibly the strangest electronic act this side of Download. His name is Luke Slater, and he is definately one of a kind.
The beats exhibited on this album do much to stray from the mainstream 'boom tiss boom tiss,' wandering into a variety of syncopated stylings. But much more important than that is the sheer number of distinct environments and artificial situations he traverses in the span of just one sixteen-track album.
I found myself lost in a drinking straw at a throbbing dance club at around midnight... attending a space station throbfest, then sitting outside listening to satellite's pass... confounded by confusion...tapping my pencil on my office desk, frantic, frenzied...holding conversations with mainframes...being tossed around by beat-factions competing for global media attention...relaxing to some fancy break-infused freak hypnosis... bowing to a digital god in a psuedo-religious dub chant...shaking my stuff in a wild seventies funk beat cutup...grooving harder to a rebirth of rave culture...munching on groove-spiced bleepcore, sucking down a very sweet dance-trance milkshake for desert...and finally finding my way home for some much-deserved chilling.
What a trip! I heartily suggest this album to any fans of the genre. Forget for a moment that you may not know his name or his game, and pick up Luke Slater's Freek Funk and give it a listen... cuz this boy's got skills.
