New Music: Broken Fader Cartel, Team Shadetek

subQtaneous - o, he is not so evil (Broken Fader Cartel 2007)

Scanone - Spit (Broken Fader Cartel 2007)

Various Artists - Cloud Control / Broken Fader Cartel

Normally when we think of whatever "IDM" has come to mean in this post-Kid A or post-Give Up world, we think of the frosty north: Eskimos on laptops looking to an endless sun for inspiration, frostbitten Brits thinking their way around the NME, or Berlin ravers who are just "over it" and want something completely different. Even in the US, Jimmy Tamborello is about what "IDM" has come to in recent years, and he was northern California (San Francisco these days, I think).

But electronica in its broken-beat or minimalist forms can come from anywhere. The tropical influence of South America, the underworld of Australia, California, whatever. This intrigue in what electronic can do and in the organic elements that make it so much more approachable than it was in the heady days of Autechre and Aphex Twin has helped it gain former guitar-and-drum loyalists at exponentially increasing rates in the last decade.

One of the great bastions to rock-free-of-electronics and the idealist notion of "guitar rock" is the North Carolina Triangle Region. With a load of schools in a relatively condensed space - Raleigh is only about 40 miles from Durham, likewise to Chapel Hill and Carrboro, and Duke, UNC, NC State, etc. all call it home - there has always been a scene that has produced great bands and, of course, Merge Records stands as the ultimate testament to this. But electronica... That is not something you find a great deal of in the Southeast. Broken Fader Cartel is looking to change that. Their latest effort is their strongest: Cloud Control is a compilation featuring 15 different artists from five different countries that have all convened on this glitch-heavy label to provide a remarkable set of songs whose quality is supreme. Theodore Geisel would be proud, especially in the artwork that pays homage if only subtly.

I first got into them last year when they sent Nauseous Youth Future's Dosage. Not expecting a great deal from Brian Flanders and a record label that was just three albums deep at the time, I was blown away by the fact that it was so competently and convincingly done by a dude from North Carolina rather than just "the north." As it turned out, this was just a microcosm of the label as a whole: Sampled here is the subQtaneous project, six main members the core in a 15-strong collective that has "o, he is not so evil," without the caps, is its featured song here. Scanone is an English DJ based out of East London and from a strictly visual standpoint, virtually none of the artwork in the back catalog looks anything like Cloud Control, but listening to "Spit," you see why this makes sense in the context of the compilation: Throbbing bass and tinny hi-hat persistence pay handsome dividends late in the album.

I've never liked the idea of digging holes to bury artists in (or maybe I like making so many up, pigeonholes are ultimately rendered meaningless anyway) and burying labels is even worse, but if there really is such a thing as "IDM" and there is a "standard" to bear for it, Broken Fader Cartel must surely be flying the flag. All the sweeter, then, that they should mostly be coming from the unassuming college nucleus that is NC's Triangle.













Team Shadetek - Eraser (Soundink 2007)

Team Shadetek - Pale Fire / Soundink

We talk about the shrinking world all the time in the media. From collegiate communications classes to your favorite music mag, the name of the game is a flatter, smaller world. It's passé even to bring up the Internet as a major factor in the musical market so I'll skip the history lesson here and just cut straight to the chase: Team Shadetek is the latest product of global thinking in aural form.

A first, second or fifth listen through without checking on guest contributors would have you believing that the two Manhattan-bred boys Matt Schell and Zach Tucker weren't even from America; their grime and dancehall beats call to mind Kingston or London before New York (though that would be a close-enough third). "Sick Ting" is the best example of that, and with a load of MCs from other parts of the globe (Red Dragon and High Priest among them) to add that dash of flavor to the deep grooves and distant syn stabs. As far as sinister goes, the MCs that drop through to lend their voice aren't afraid to talk about issues that affect your typical conscious writers: Politics, wooing ladies either directly or indirectly, where you're from, and how awesome you are respectively. But it's "Eraser" that stands out musically, a deep, dark backstreet bass line slithering its way through the streets. The whole album resonates with the knowledge Schell and Tucker picked up during their time spent traversing Europe and residing in Berlin. As he said in an interview recently, "I had to get out of New York before I could really be here." In that sense, the rhymes that accompny Team Shadetek's beats have to get out of Jamaica or East London or Manhattan before they really sound like they're from there. Channeling it through the electronic, hip-hop and grime riddims of the world, Team Shadetek are a lot like Broken Fader Cartel: Informed by an information (and ever-more informative) age, they bring those of us on the fringes together under the banner of better taste. I believe.