alog / astral social club

Split

*Includes Alog's mindblowing 12-minute trip through reduced Afro-cosmic disco and fluid post-everything vibes - A MUST!!!* Fat Cat's split series has provided earnest listeners with some truly wondrous listening experiences over the course of 19 split 12"s pairing some of the most crucial artists in the world. From AMM/Merzbow to Gescom/Foehn, or Konono No.1/The Dead C, Fat Cat's impeccable tastes have wrung out the best of the underground for over 10 years, notching up their 20th installment with a remarkable release from Norwegian professional amateurs Alog and one of the UK's most vital psyche-noise outfits, Astral Social Club. Track 39 comes from Alog, mainstays of the essential Rune Grammofon imprint and winners of a Norwegian Grammy for best Electronica release in 2006, no less. Their catalogue is filled with endearingly inquisitive experiments featuring their own homemade instruments used to facilitate their huge sonic scope, stretching from avant-jazz noise to gorgeously fragile electronica, but for Fat cat they've handed over a total game-changer, a mindblowing piece of Afro-cosmic disco that sounds like a cross between the Animal Collective, Ike Release, and Tony Allen - except even better then that sounds. Perhaps spurred by fellow Norwegians Lindstrom and Prins Thomas, over 12 minutes 'Every Word Was Once An Animal' trip centres around hypnotically slow-pulsing rhythms with fluid guitar trickling beneath noisy electronic textures and Nicholas H. Møllehaug's vocal incantations lending a primally meditative feel with hints of free-roaming Krautrock. It's just an untouchable slice of cross-platform genius and we just cant get enough of it. Over on the other side, arcane psychedelic explorers Astral Social Club chart a compatible route with 'Clarion Super-Cortex', mulching indefinable electronic sequences into a repetitive throb with far-out flanged tones circling overhead. The folksy acoustic guitar of 'Vurt Chorale *1' follows with an accompaniement of what sounds like a sitar and a psilocybic overgrowth of unstable electronic noise, before finishing on the lysergic forest-rave blast of 'Corby Kiss'. It's an absolute head-trip of the highest order, and just the sort of brilliance we expect from a Fat Cat split, meaning we'd have to recommend this 12" very highly to fans of anything from Animal Collective to Paavoharju or Emeralds. An incredible display of supreme selection skills from Fat Cat's most fascinating department - ignore it at your peril.