Description
Wheww! Proper sci-fi boogie skooled Detroit beatdown by the one and only MGUN on the 100 Limousines label, who previously served an AOTY of ’21 with Kemetrix’s debut album – pure crud for fans of the 313’s weirdest, slower strains cultivated and mutated by likes of NRSB-11, Shake, Urban Tribe, H-Fusion, Actress
As a solo producer of repute since his killer 2012 serves on TTT and Kyle Hall’s Wild Oats; as part of UR’s live act; and now with his own label Hold Me Recordings: Manual Gonzales is a pivotal player in the Motor City new school. Following the deadly uptempo swerve of his self-released LP ‘From Time to Time’, this new lot for 100 Limousines gives Gonzales room to run the rudest and most paranoid lines of his imagination, portraying a vision of Detroit as a post-industrial playground for cyborgs and noumenal being across 10 mutated variations of Afro-Latin rhythm and sci-fi electro, all rubbed with X-amount of dirt in the circuitry.
In its underlying narrative themes and feel for slouched cyberfunk, the LP shares a strong kinship with Kemetrix’s outstanding ‘Here and Now’ album and the earlier work of Urban Tribe – a secretive unit headed by Sherard Ingram (DJ Stingray) and said to include Anthony Shakir, Carl Craig and Kemetrix a.o. – and H-Fusion’s freakish ‘Entities’, or even the rusted, psychoactive klang of Wolf Eyes’ trip metal, as MGUN tends toward a physics of muggy meter and polluted atmospheres bloodshot with a palpable, if elusive, sense of Motor City soul.
Opening with something like a lost Todd Dockstader intro for the Electrifying Mojo in the bleak bleeps of ‘Save Here’, Manny grinds out proper sci-fi thug beatdown in ‘DCDG’, and allows for playful respite in the rusted percolations of ‘Little Bubbles’, swerving between briny vignettes of synth gunk and sawn-off boogie to a superb 2nd half laying down the funk with a mucky trowel on ‘Whistle Blower’, thru the Howard Thomas-esque MPC rumble of ‘Krep’, into the neon-lit synth flicker of ‘Side Street’ and jit-tering robo-tump to ’TAPEHISSISTHIS’.
— BOOMKAT
