marsen jules / vladislav delay / various

Beaterblocker Compilation

A quick glance across the tracklist of this excellent compilation will reveal no preset genre-fixated agenda, casting Marissa Nadler next to Marsen Jules, and Vladislav Delay alongside Women & Children. Seemingly the only condition determining the music policy of Beaterblocker is that all selections should be ace. The motivation behind this very personal selection of music stems from its curator having suffered a heart attack at the tender age of 21, and feeling indebted to the staff who helped him recuperate at the Homerton Hospital in Hackney, he assembled this collection of music, the proceeds from which would go to the ACU and Lamb wards. It all gets off to a pretty exceptional start thanks to a piece by Rhodri Davies and Louisa Martin. Given Davies' usual instrument of choice, you'd imagine there's some sort of harp presence buried in there somewhere, but the abstract, elEctroacoustically treated tones are unrecognisably removed from any readily discernible source. Next comes the Marissa Nadler contribution. It's one of the tracks here that'll already be familiar, but in all fairness, 'Diamond Heart' is also arguably her finest song to date, so it's more than welcome regardless. Next up, Marsen Jules supplies a dose of cinemascope ambience on 'Yara Series 1', which sounds like some distant orchestral overture coated in dream-pop vocals and general looped loveliness. Alex Smoke lifts the pace on 'It's A Carni Life', only for new artists Dead Leaf Echo to take the baton and turn out a rather brilliant dub-techno ditty called 'Anti-Matter'. Straddling the divide between ambience and beat-driven electronics, Vladislav Delay arrives with the rhythmic riptide of 'Raamat', which could hardly be a more engaging slab of pure electronic texture. Similarly, Klimek manages to prevent the idea of 'beatless soundscapes' from becoming amorphous or devoid of structure, ploughing through glitch symphony 'Kingdoms Here We Come', last seen on 2006's Music To Fall Asleep. There's simply too much to cover here, and there's barely wordspace to give shout-outs to the superb 'The Wolfman's Tick-Tock' by Women & Children, or the sublime closer 'Grey Teeth'by Dirty Projector Angel Deradoorian. All you need know is that there's really not a dud to be found anywhere here, and since the money goes to a great cause, there's really nothing but good to come of you purchasing this. Highly recommended.