Imagi:Nations Part 1: Night

Various

Imagi:Nations Part 1: Night

Tipworld (UK)

Psyreviews is trumping this album quite a lot, but only because psyreviews knows that you’re likely to pass it up and not really give it serious consideration. However, Night is a damn fine collection and, when considered together with Day (also reviewed this week) it looks, sounds, and smells even better. Dino’s side project Bullet Proof opens with Bolivia, and right from the start it’s clear that we’re not in pansy territory here. Riffs that sound like Dino and X-Dream’s bastard lovechild ascend all over the place, escalating perfectly and getting harder and harder, until a smooth break takes things in the general direction of funkytown. A nice wobbly preamble later, and that awesome riff comes back in, with more twist, to move it skywards, minor key stylee. Black & White’s Status starts with an awesome, long sample from the start of Fight Club – one of my favourite (and undersampled) films, and therefore I am pretty much immediately sold. Status moved nicely, briging in little melodic spurts and flurries, and hooks itself on a high-end riff that’s admittedly a little too cheesy for some nighttime dancefloors, but whose impact and effectiveness you can’t doubt. Save The Robot’s Painted Dove is nice, a bustling groove that pushes you right along, awash with tasty riffs and noises and packed full of the kind of energy that you associate with a dancefloor suddenly getting twice as busy as it was. It eases up and breaks with a hell of a trick up its sleeve… cheeky samples and stabs from Softcell’s Tainted Love. Cheesy? Actually no, the stabs are used refreshingly sparingly, and other than a stuttered, time stretched “get away”  and “oh,” Marc Almond is thankfully absent. In short, it works – and makes a monster tune even more of a monster. Next up is Astrix’s Oranda XI, remixed here by Xerox & Illumination. The original one (which I think came out on Exposure Productions’ Digital Performers CD, which I missed) I’d not realised was Astrix, but have heard played in the UK as well as in Japan and Australia earlier this year. Psyreviews has never really got on with Astrix, but the high-end melody here works a treat. A distorted line plays off a kind of call-and-response with a cleaner, happier one, and this phases in and around Xerox & Illumination’s typical cleverer-than-it-first-sounds production. X Noize’s Anjuna Beach is that Delta As A Child… remix that’s been doing the rounds lately, and (I think) it’s a slightly different version than was released on Utopia recently. It’s more fluid somehow, though still a little too stop-start for my liking. However, if you’ve not heard this before then fck me is it a goodun, and fck me doesn’t it do the business on the dancefloor. All the best bits you loved about the original, updated by X Noize, with a combination style that sounds nothing like either artist, and it’s still got the best guitar line ever. The delightful, please-do-another-album Logic Bomb continue with their renewed good form with a remix of Marauder, one of the moodier tunes from Unlimited (which, don’t we all feel old, was released three years ago). This remix has pretty much everything you want from the boys with cinematic melodies, smooth production, tweaky psychedelia and that sinister hint that they seem to do so well. It takes a while to build itself up, but when it peaks f*ck me it peaks – a delicious concoction of energy, groove and twist. WSD from Terraformers vs Phonic Request reminds me a lot of the stuff Tip was putting out circa 3D, with a very edgy sound and tricks and traps like white noise, dropped beats, acidhouse pitfalls and… look, it’s just fucking eerie alright? It’s not dark in a “dark psy” sort of way, nothing thrashes you around the room like a dinosaur with a bit of human leg stuck between its teeth. It simply builds up layers and layers of space, then makes noises as though your brain’s being tickled by a feather on a stick. Sandman’s Testers Choice, his first on tip in quite a while, is a fucking corker. I just love the groove here – it’s smooth and funky, there’s space-mission-control samples, three different types of acid, plenty of changes… hang on, isn’t this the Tip we know and love again? Another older act making an appearance here is Johann, responsible for some of my favourite moments in this silly music we all love, whose Same Same But Different is possibly my favourite of the lot. Ballsy, with subdued and perfectly-placed guitar, a frenetic groove and some of the nicest splurges and splodges heard in years. Utter corker. Finally, The Delta remix X Dream’s Intercorporal Stimulator, and what a meanie this one is. Mosr caustic than the original but no less loveable, it’s a gnarly end to a varied and well-planned compilation. Night is definitely the best thing Tip have put their name to in years – I would even go so far as to say that it might be the best thing they’ve released since Beyond Colour.