Various Artists
La Danse du Gouffre
Toulouse Gouffre Club
The Bite and Ritmo Fatale labels have been at the cutting edge of the ongoing italo body music wave, and while Toulouse Gouffre Club certainly hasn’t been as prolific as those two, its new La Danse du Gouffre compilation certainly places the collective, run by French producer Arabian Panther, right in that mix. Beginning with exactly the sort of deft and neon-soaked banger we’ve come to take for granted from Pablo Bozzi, the comp serves up some pleasantly shaded tunes from Fred Terror, Marcus Christiansen, and Ravenn, each with their own spin on connecting wet and bright italo leads to more rubbery and thudding rhythm programming. Some classic trance from ERROR508 and colder and more Berlin-adjacent EBM from Flore di Fuoco add a bit of variety, with a rather menacing reworking of Sting’s “Russians” by Blind Delon (yes, seriously) finishing things off on a somewhat portentous note. Plenty for DJs looking to add some extra colour and bounce to their sets to look through here.
Black Asteroid
New Flesh
Pls.UK
Bryan Black’s Black Asteroid often makes music that is geared for clubs, plying a flavour of industrial flavoured techno (descended from Black’s days making music as cult American industrial rock act haloblack), often with guest vocalists to give the tracks some added musical flavour. 2023’s New Flesh stands a little further apart from the sounds more commonly associated with the band, favouring a more fluid sound – outside of the Frontline Assembly collab “Methane Rain” and its bass-led kick-snare rhythms, and the crunchy, but DJ-ready closer “Control Voltage”, the tracks lean towards more open and freewheeling structures. The opening title track harnesses a plodding drumbeat and crackling static percussion to give shape to a messy collection of glitched out synth patches that slip through the track’s dense arrangement of noise. “The Void of Nothingness” shows a yen for more technoid sounds, still built around drum programming but with it’s reveresed reverb out melodies oozzing between the cracks. Even the brief “Transistor” has some unique sonic markers, spotlighhting a plucked bass guitar and feedback over its more overtly sequenced elements. New Flesh is a pleasantly different vision of what a familiar act can bring to the table.
