WOEBOT

THE GASMAN
THE GRAND ELECTRIC PALACE OF VARIETY
PLANET MU

Chris Reeves’ latest release for Planet Mu is, even in its weaker moments, unfailingly entertaining. One can’t help but opine with him that the tropes pioneered by The Aphex Twin through the nineties, the ends of whose catalogue Reeves is unabashed to admit stylistic bookend his work, are practically failsafe recipes for a solid listening experience. The breathy heliated synth stabs and tickling filigree of drums that characterise The Aphex Twin’s billowing double-down rave odysseys are powerfully seductive. Indeed there’s nothing whatsoever wrong with working within someone else’s stylistic parameters; the result can stand or fall on its own merits regardless. Originality, it has been wisely argued by Simon Reynolds, can be a greatly over-rated quality in music.

Still there is much that distinguishes The Gasman from his mentors. Most obviously his music doesn’t have the forbidding sheen of Richard James’ or Paradinas’. Reeves roots for a rough-edged approximation full of homemade charm, it being the aural counterpoint to the intriguingly ham-fisted and grotesque illustration of the cover. Often sampling spools of classical music from reel-to-reel he’ll transform typically classical sonic gestures into their counterparts in the lexicon of Rave music. For instance on “Imodium” where a few snatches of choral music are finger-triggered into an Ardkore fantasia or on “Fridge” where mournful concert piano vamps are set amidst drill’n’bass fidgeting.

At moments on the collection your cochlea is swooning. “Muzzle” is exquisite, rattling whirring clicks take the drum’s role in the foreground while the melody hovers cumulo-nebulously on the track’s horizon. Timbral invention is writ large too in “Dodgem” with its impressive resonant bassline, the track resembling nothing so much as a skippy version of Marc Arcadipane’s Gloomcore. However too many tracks are cut from the same cloth and at times in Ambient mode things drag rather.

“The Grand Electric Palace of Variety” appears to be but the merest fragment of The Gasman’s output. He claims to be producing an astonishing 25 releasable tracks a month. Planet Mu label boss Mike Paradinas allocated himself the task of sifting through this material to determine what made the grade. In the face of daunting quantities of music like this, rigorous editing must be the crucial modus operandi. While we have two CDs here, one may have sufficed.