WOEBOT

The Lickets
Fake Universe Man
International Corporation

From the Max Ernst-styled merz of the cover of "Fake Universe Man" to the International Corporation's zoned-out PR-sheet which refreshingly comes under the guise of a big-business communique replete with analysis detailing the temporal point-origin of each vertical strata of the CD in relation to it's position along the recording's timeline, it's evident The Lickets are not some tepidly traditional collective.

It's an impression galvanised by opener "Big Happy Bubble" in which the listener enters an impossibly dense forest, ponds choked by gigantic fronds, the sky light blotted out and peopled by a thousand different varieties of bird and frog. The ten tracks of "Fake Universe Man" smudge and bleed into one another. "Reconstructing Research" is immediately reminiscent of Hal Blaine's paisley-shirted grooves and the long-form ticker-tape, tiny-legged, rhythms on Faust's So Far; doppler-donkey horns trot past. The vintage arcade bleeps of "123 Infinity" segue into, and lean onto, "Main Character Package Machine's" clangorous cembula sourced from Tibetan Ritual. Further on we encounter the binary loom stomp of "Magnificent New Terminal Meeting" and the glinting arcadian charm of "Shopping In The Future."

The collision of this hand-drum aesthetic within the context of Hard-Disk editing is symptomatic of the deepening affinities between Electronica and the original vagabond orphan of Folk music. Perhaps audible first in the music of Matmos, it's an improbable détente which has been forged in consequence of the agonisingly slow death of dance music. Where once the cutting edge of electronic music sought to dally with the unselfconsciously avant-garde mutations of the post-rave fracas, in their absence it's now committing necrophilia with John Barleycorn.

It's a slight shame that "Cat Runs a Company", the album's 20 minute-long centerpiece, slightly disappoints, veering as it does into a more "classical" take on the Italian Soundtrack, recycling the stock phrases of Sciascia and Morricone rather glibly.