Coptic Caller Calls
Barry no be Long
Flatter Than You
Pummel
Corn
Aka
Journey Going No Where
Silent in the Corner
Mycopic Jar
Skip a Beating
Bring-Bing
Yakk

Straiph hails from the highlands of Scotland: "The ethos and my artistic style comes direct from my environment because of my interest in archetypes dealing with conceptual sound-works around the notion of primordial reverence."

The CD opens with "Coptic Caller Calls", a pretty intense, multi-layered track with various human voice samples (sometimes reminiscent of a telephone exchange/radio frequency) and fluctuating drones, overlapping. With several breaks in the music, this 10 minute+ track feels like a collage or two or three tracks instead of just the one. "Barry Be No Long " is quite frustrating. It beings with a crackling backdrop, overlayered voices and then introduces beats building up to some great rhytmical noise. This track was just starting to go somewhere when it stopped - "Mycopic Jar" also begs to go farther. "Flatter Than You" is a short, quiet track with echoing ambient drones, in a similar style to "AKA" and "Bring Bing". "Pummel" begins with reverberation under metallic percussion with strong slow beats emerging alongside glitches. Voice samples take over with drones leading to strong metallic percussion and beats, toning down to some distorted rhythms and a French voice to end. This is definitely the strongest track on the album. Female voices feature throughout (American/French/English - muses/scientists) with great effect in "Silent in the Corner" and "Skip a Beating", underlined by deep echoing drones. Sporadic electronic samples are cut, pasted and manipulated throughout: "Journey Going Nowhere" and "Com" are great examples of this. The whole thing culminates with the busy track "Yakk", featuring most of the voices sampled throughout, constantly overtaking one another.

Overall this is an quite an experimental release with elements of the artist's scientific influences coming though. Irregular in places and interesting throughout, my only qualm would be that some of the tracks seem ill-timed: too long or too short.

JLM