Editorial Reviews Music Review:
Music Review
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Music: Tokyo [CD-single] [Import]
Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition; Night on the Bare Mountain [Hybrid SACD] [SACD]
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Third Eye Foundation make dark and dreamy electronic music. On the surface, the edgy, skittering drum programming owes a lot to drum & bass, but the overall aesthetic of Matt Elliott (the wizard of this particular Oz) stands a bit apart. Like Squarepusher circa Feed Me Weird Things (minus the spunk-jazz zaniness) or New York's We, the beats seem intended to destabilize the pulse rather than issue a challenge to dancers, sidestepping the dance floor in favor of heightening the uneasiness of the music. Elliott's use of vocals is what makes this release really distinctive. They seem to be neither the kind of sampled snippets that are plainly "flown in" from some other source and recontextualized, nor are they clearly new performances sung along with the rest of the music. He uses both male and female voices, heavily electronically mutated from their original forms, and their overall impact is very lush even when it's hard to call them beautiful in any conventional sense. --Bob Bannister