Collector's Item
when i first picked this up, it didn't do very much for me. there will be inevitable suggestions of music constructed with electronics being out of the realm of the average luddite gybe! fanatic, but no such thing would apply to me. it was quite the opposite; the disc seemed too repetitive and not complex enough to satisfy my elite tastes in the electronic spectrum.
it has held up surprisingly well, though. well, ok, some of the spoken word seems a little juvenile. if you didn't have "enough" (??) friends, would you be quiet until you did? is your confidence determined by the solidarity you command, rather than the other way around? i may be keenly interested in the free goat cheese that you're offering after the revolution, but this idea that your analysis is only as valid as the number of people that agree with it is sort of totalitarian and frightening. truth by consensus, people; we'll have a vote on the validity of the laws of thermodynamics after supper, and whether or not they're oppressive in denying perpetual motion. i could continue, but to what end?
i somehow missed a lot of the subtlety in the recording. i'm not really quite sure how. i'm sure i would have listened to it through headphones, although my memories mostly involve listening to it on low volume in the middle of the night while living beside a noisy furnace. i think maybe i didn't miss it so much as i ignored it as ambience. for whatever reason, it is coming out at me in much higher quality right now. this is making the record sound better produced than i would have initially said it was, but it isn't adding anything to the songs themselves.
in it's most basic description, this is "drum and bass" with a tempo that is closer to trip-hop than to jungle. you could get away with calling it trip-hop. the record is largely built around cut up drum loops that aidan performed himself. i'm still suspecting that he's using reel-to-reel loops through large portions of it due to the nature of the loops, but the production does seem more electronic now than it did then. at the very least, he seems to be sampling parts that were treated with old fashioned effects work. a lot of the bass and string samples, though, seem to be ultimately coming from his bandmates. you can pick out parts from fly pan am songs, gybe! songs, etc.
in the end, it's just somebody fucking around with samples. that person has a particularly interesting sample source to play with, but that doesn't transcend it from what it is. the 1-speed bike seems to be a reference to the lack of variation in the tempo, which is something that makes the record drag a bit. it does work well as background music - perhaps for reading, or perhaps for eating (it is, after all, dedicated to the dishwasher) - but there isn't anything about the record that makes it worth finding.
...except the label it was released on and the person that produced it; this is an item for collectors.
i wish i would have been in montreal more often back in the day, though, to hear aidan spin in real time.
stream:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mz3ncaHBf-k&list=OLAK5uy_kU8J_OldZQA1XOpzwDtIgd1kVaUWbY11o
http://dghjdfsghkrdghdgja.appspot.com/categories/music/artists/1-speedbike/2000-DroopyButtBegone/index.html
