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Tiga continues to spice up the electro and techno scene with a slew of exciting remixes and productions of his own under both his moniker ZZT (with Zombie Nation, check out our review of The Worm) and as a solo artist. After making a name for himself with electropoppy glam slammers as heard on his Sexor album, the Canadian poseur has found a new sound remarked by sleazy acid and filthy techy beats. Mind Dimension lives up to this new direction. It's Tiga and Josh Wink's love baby from hell...

This EP comes with rather glamorous but brilliant cover art (Prince, anyone?) and includes two tracks: Mind Dimension 1, produced by Tiga and Jesper Dahlback, and Mind Dimension 2 reworked by Soulwax. The first track opens with a basic electrohouse rhythm with filthy bass-line and some very nasty acid noises, after which the sequence rattles on with various unexpected breaks and Tiga vocals ("Everytime I look into your eyes I see the future"). The many breaks make up for the lack of a real climax, and give the track a rather experimental touch. With many noisy sounds, roaring bass-lines and vicious oldschool electro percussion, the track eventually ends up as a very odd but very adventurous tracks. However, a hard nut for DJ's to crack due to its many breaks.

Mind Dimension sees the evil Belgium Soulwax bros. re-defining the track. The result is a more straight-forward electrohouse rocker with hard rocking bass-lines and many robotic sound effects. Although it seems as if the brothers just re-arranged the tracks parts at first, there is actually a cool break near the end of the track, followed by a techy climax that'll bring down the house. A worthy remake.

Overall speaking, this EP is really the kind of stuff you can expect from Tiga when he's in a jolly mood. Both tracks are very experimental, almost demo-esque and contain some very unorthodox breaks. And that's exactly what makes both tracks so cool. It gives the finger to all producers that create easy sequences for the floor and goes its own way guided by a series of punk sounds. A very original tune and definitely worth checking out.

Track-list:

1. Mind Dimension 1
2. Mind Dimension 2

I really supported their label Goldtrack Records when they were established ten years ago (they later disbanded. I guess I understand why). I am sorry to slag of any of their output, but this album is really bad. A Spanish band singing in English about whatever. The vocals are pretty horrendous. Thin and painful to listen to. The music...... well, not a single good track. OK, the first track is half decent. But the rest is utterly power metal cliches and hardly worthy to be put in a CD. It is a worm's dinner. Only the opening track and some good musicianship is the saving grace here. I very much prefer Triana to this album. Only for the fans of power metal.

...at least this album now have a review.

by toroddfuglesteg


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Aftermath doesn’t shock easily. But last night, I was absolutely floored when I walked out of Meridian as the Butthole Surfers were mopping up their nearly 90-minute set and realized I was stone. Cold. Sober. Of all the shows to climb on the wagon…

Don’t get me wrong, it’s perfectly possible to enjoy the Surfers’ belligerent psychedelic music – and I did - without the benefit of excessive alcohol, marijuana or hallucinogens. But still, it was missing that certain something, the hidden layers inside the band’s psychotic performance art that only reveals itself after liberal indulgence in mind-altering chemicals.

Judging by the jam-packed crowd – many of whom, including one beardo in a choice orange Pain Teens T-shirt, appeared to have not ventured out since the Surfers former stomping grounds the Axiom shut down – this put Aftermath in the definite minority, especially since I know for a fact at least one person was running around gleefully handing out gratis tabs of acid.

And I can’t speak for the band, but frontman Gibby Haynes was either on something unknown to even Central American shamen or, well, just being Gibby Haynes. It took an hour before I understood a single lyric that came out of his mouth.

“Do they always play shitfaced?” a photographer acquaintance asked me during a smoke break.

“Ummm… pretty much?”

If nothing else, a clear head made it that much easier to appreciate the ferocious guitar talents of Paul Leary, who certainly seemed as sober as I was and proved to be quite the card. “I’m having trouble reading my setlist up here,” he said shortly after the Surfers walked onstage. So was I, given Haynes’ indecipherable lyrics and the fact that half their material sounded more like sketchwork than actual songwriting. (The other half more than made up for it.)

Speaking of art, Leary treated his instrument like an abstract expressionist painter might treat a canvas, following his fretboard hither and yon through concrete-thick bursts of squalling feedback and surprisingly heartstring-tugging psychedelic melodies. He opened with a ponderous riff sludgier than almost anything Black Sabbath put to wax, and quoted Jimi Hendrix’s “Burning of the Midnight Lamp” not long after.

Rembrandt Pussyhorse’s “Creep in the Cellar,” believe it or don’t, sounded almost Bostonian, and Led Zeppelin cues were all over the place. The Surfers may not be anyone’s idea of classic rock, but a case could be made.

Up to a point, anyway. No one would mistake the demented blues of “Moving to Florida” for Eric Clapton – more like Marilyn Manson’s “The Beautiful People.” (The beautiful people, the beautiful people… were not here.) And there was enough full-bore blast-furnace punk rock that bassist Jeff Pinkus and twin drummers King Coffey and Teresa Taylor can probably go ahead and skip that workout today.

Equal parts chaotic and melodic, the Surfers’ set made a fitting epitaph for the band's tumultuous career, never more than on pulverizing Independent Worm Saloon standouts “Goofy’s Concern,” “Dust Devil” and “Some Dispute Over T-Shirt Sales.” Since the Surfers are unlikely to return to either full-time active status or to Houston anytime soon, Aftermath is glad I remember the show so clearly. But I still can’t help wondering how it might have been if I’d eaten a mushroom or two beforehand. – Chris Gray

Texas psych-punk renegades the Butthole Surfers have temporarily put aside their differences for a handful of shows, including at Meridian tonight (doors 8 p.m.). This is the final installment of Rocks Off's interview with the Surfers' former manager Tom Bunch. Part 1 is here; part 2 is here. When we left off, Bunch was shopping the band to major labels...

Rocks Off: Did you hear a lot of “No way”?

Tom Bunch: One of the A&R guys at Arista wanted to sign them, and Clive Davis said “There’s no way I’m going to have a band named Butthole Surfers on my roster. It’ll tarnish the pretty names of my pop stars just having that name next to them.” But somebody in his company wanted to sign them. There was a guy, Peter Lubin, at Elektra – Terry Tolkien, who signed the band to Rough Trade, ended up going to Elektra after Rough Trade tanked.

Paul Leary said he thought we were going to take $300,000 from them and deliver a record called Sounds of the Texas Highways, and it was just going to be [imitates cars passing on highway] 38 minutes of cars going by. Peter Lubin was sure we were going to take his money and give him some piece of shit just to have a joke on a big corporation, and he actually said that. So that kind of killed that.

RO: What made Capitol bite?

TB: Hale Milgrim, who was president of Capitol Records, came to see the band in New York at a club on the West Side. 17th or 18th [Street] and the West Side Highway – the Marquee Club. The Surfers were booked for two nights, and I got him to come see the show. That was actually a star-studded night. There were probably eight or ten record-label VPs or presidents, the Jane’s Addiction guys were there, Jane’s Addiction’s managers. There were probably 30 or 40 people in the VIP section that were either rock stars, band managers or record-label execs.

Hale saw the show and he just loved it. He came back to see the next night, and then he came back to see the show six months later in Los Angeles. He just completely loved the band. Hale was the head marketing person at Elektra for a long time, and he loves all the hippie bands. He went to all the psychedelic shows and was a big pothead – still is a big pothead. He hung out with the band, and the band personally liked him. He got along with everybody and was just incredibly enthusiastic.

Rick Rubin also made an offer. We spent a lot of time with Rick. I like him a lot, he’s a friend of mine. They say he’s artist-friendly, but his deals are not that artist-friendly. He’ll hang out with you, he’ll produce the record, you’ll feel comfortable with him, but for all of that he makes the lion’s share of the money.

It came down to Rick and Capitol. Interscope made an offer, Sony made an offer, Rick Rubin made an offer for Def American, Capitol made an offer. I think those were the firm deals. We probably spent three or four months talking to everybody, going to their offices and meeting everybody at the company, asking them what they would do and how they would do it.

The band and I were really concerned that these companies had not done anything like this at all, so [we asked] what are your ideas, who’s going to be working on the project, why do you think you can take it from where it’s at to selling hundreds of thousands or millions of records, so we had meeting after meeting after meeting with 8 to 15 people at each label, and it took a long time.

The end result was Hale Milgrim was the most excited about it and made the best offer, and promised me as a manager he would do whatever he needed to do to make the band successful, and if I needed to hire outside companies or anything like that, he would be there to write the check and let me do what I needed to do to augment his company. At that point in time, they were coming off Poison and the Smithereens, a bunch of power-pop and hair-band stuff, and they had absolutely nothing like this.

RO: How much resistance did you encounter because of the name? There’s that famous story about how the Austin American-Statesman would never run the word “butthole” in print. How common was that back then?

1993's Independent Worm Saloon

People called in and asked for the Butthole Surfers, so a couple people said it and nothing happened. It was on Beavis and Butt-head over and over and over and over – one of the few songs that was played on Beavis and Butt-head start to finish – and I’d say about 60 or 70 percent of the newspapers started printing “Butthole Surfers.” By 1996, when Electriclarryland came out, 95 percent of the newspapers and radio stations said and printed it without a problem.

There was resistance to it, but radio stations got phone calls for the songs, writers at newspapers wanted to do interviews. There was a large amount of resistance, but we allowed people to use “BH Surfers” and people got over it fairly quick. [“Pepper”] was the No. 1- or No. 2-played modern rock track of 1996, and it was in the Top 10 MTV videos of that whole year. It wasn’t as much of a problem as people feared it would be.

RO: How much of managing the band was babysitting?

Not only that, but without asking me or anybody else, he called the president of Capitol Records and said, “I hope you don’t expect us to tour, because I’m not gonna travel with that motherfucker.” The president of Capitol Records calls me at 10 o’clock at night and says, “Uh, Tom, I just got off the phone with the guitar player, and he says he refuses to tour and hopes that doesn’t kill my offer.”

So a large, large, large, large, large part of my job was to keep the two principals of the band apart until they had to make a record or do a tour; bring them together just for rehearsals.

RO: Was it a traveling thing or they just didn’t like each other?

TB: By the time I started managing them, they didn’t like each other. There was long-term history and situations that I had no information or idea about. I always said it makes for great music – the sparks and the clash and the difficulty between the two people I think came out in the music as intensity and passion and weirdness and danger and excitement. But dealing with it on a daily basis, as in dollars and cents and facts and figures and times and dates, made it very, very, very difficult.

RO: How did you resolve that? Two buses?

TB: No. There’s no two buses. Two buses is for pussies. Are you kidding? You’ve gotta be making hundreds of thousands of dollars a show to afford two buses. As a matter of fact, the Butthole Surfers were scrambling to afford one bus. I just kept them apart until they had to do rehearsals and tour. They just did not spend that much time together until the tour or the recording or the rehearsals for the tour. So yeah, I guess that was babysitting and, you know, late-night and early-morning drawn-out phone calls about everything under the sun?

RO: How did Jeff and King take all this?

RO: When did you stop managing them?

TB: I stopped managing them in early 1999, I don’t remember the exact month.

RO: What happened? Did you quit or were you asked to quit?

TB: I couldn’t take it no more. I enjoyed every bit of what I did when I was managing them, but the last three or four years I managed them, they didn’t do that much work. They didn’t want to play together, they didn’t want to record together, they didn’t even want to see each other – meaning Gibby and Paul.

RO: That would have been after their most successful album, so they probably didn’t have to, right?

During that time, we licensed five, six, seven songs to movie soundtracks, and some of them were huge movie soundtracks. Most of the time the songs were already completed – it was something they had left off an album from some recording session. We made lots and lots of money, and they weren’t having to get together.

RO: How well did they wind up doing financially?

TB: For 1996 standards, very well. They made more money than bands that sold five or six times the records, partially because of the deals that I had structured, because I had structured very lucrative deals all the way around for them. And we didn’t sell off our publishing; we didn’t pay a business manager five percent of the gross for everything.

There were all kinds of deals that I did that kept artistic and financial control in their hands, and limited the number of people that were sharing in the profits. They did really well. Compared to today’s standards, not so well, but the standards at that point in time, they did really well. They made a lot of money – more money than they fathomed they could make when they started. – Chris Gray

After the ultimate raw energy of Kill 'Em All, where could Metallica go in their quest for World Domination (as recorded by the Music press at the time - Metallica were never modest in their aspirations)?

With Fleming Rassmussen on board, they skipped from the Metal equivalent of Piper at the Gates of Dawn, to the equivalent of Dark Side of the Moon.

For this album revolutionised Heavy Metal. Just as Kill 'Em All did.

Instead of a swaggering street brawler equipped with near-mystical black belt skillz, this is a more polished affair - from Metal Militia to Metal Mafia, you might say.

We still see the long songs - but they're longer. The complex compositional structures are more complex, the variation in approach and style is stretched almost to breaking point, and the techniques are more advanced, to the point that this is, to my ears, not only the first Progressive Metal album per se, but also the first technical metal album that combines technique with strong, accessible melody writing. The first purely technical album in this style was Megadeth's Killing is my Business and Business is Good, but that's a much less accessible album because of its tech focus.

And the mayhem begins with the very first track. That mellow, sharp-edged, clean cut guitar orchestra fools no-one - the tension is tangible before the increasing volume trick used on Kill 'Em All builds to a riff that makes Metal Militia sound like something by Black Sabbath on mogadons. Fight Fire with Fire is a twisting, turning, building burning effigy of mayhemic efficiency.

It SOUNDS like a thrash song, and it is. It uses the innovation of Venom's Mantas in the main riff - pedal thrased note supporting shifting accented chords - but with Lars Ulrich once again showing his dramatic flair, in a drumming style that marked Metallica out from their peers in the early days. Sure, it's nothing now, but then it was a big deal, and it's evident throughout this album, which is unique for the time;

Each drum hit is calculated, yet maintains the rock feel. Aggressive thwacks punctuate during the introduction, and a flying back beat drives and pummells. The ball of spikes is back - and it's bigger and badder.

On to the riff development - here we see a fantastic expression of this, that lives up to the famous Keith Emerson quote about Prog being music that turns itself inside out, upside down and whatever else he said. The chorus, if it can be called that, is essentially the verse riff played backwards, and the instrumental backing is a series of chords accented at precisely the right time, shifting subtly off the beat, and the sections are joined together with motifs created from the riffs themselves. It's exactly like Metallica found an alchemical way of writing - this is so far beyond ordinary metal song writing (and indeed, most Progressive Metal songwriting) that it's just not funny - and yet feels so natural, that Fight Fire With Fire sounds as fresh today as it did back in 1984. How can it possibly be 24 years old?

Basically, because this compositional style has never successfully been emulated, let alone bettered, except by Metallica themselves on their next album. It's essentially similar to what Iron Maiden and Diamond Head had done before - but never fully realised the potential in this way.

Ride The Lightning, the title track, goes above and beyond, and is easily the best track on the album from a tech/Prog standpoint, with its multi-part instrumental and crazily shifting riffs. Lyrically, it maintains the overarching theme of the album - I tend not to get overexcited by lyrics generally, but it's plain to see that there is commonality between all the songs here.

Musically, we are thrown 3 excellent ideas before the song even starts by way of intro, tritonic, angular and muscular, with obvious roots, but no obvious peers. The structure for the vocal sections is a kind of verse/mid section/chorus - but the harmonic suggestions in the riffs, and lack of clear separation between verse and chorus drive it forwards into the instrumental, which is where all hell breaks loose - a downwards descending thrashed riff leads to a vocal bridge, based motivially on the same ideas, riffs come back with changed drum tempos and punctuation, then the first guitar solo segment starts - a slow melodic idea, which picks up pace in the second segment before a variant of the descending idea throws us at neckbreak speed into the third, flying solo segment, and we're soon thrown into the fourth segment, based on a new descending idea, which changes key dramatically before reverting to the intial descending riff and back to the vocal bridge in a kind of mirror-image construction. This is all broken down into pounding drums, decorated and varied before a return to the verse/midsection/chorus parts. The riffs are varied again for the ending.

You want complexity in structure?

It really doesn't get much more complex than that!

And there are 6 songs to go...

For Whom The Bell Tolls seems like a simple little number, opening with the Black Sabbath bell and the Da-Da/Da- Da/Daaaaah! accents. But it's subtle, and the ideas worm their way around - first the descending guitar idea, then the derived descending bass motif that becomes the BIG riff - in every way a Classic in the same way that Paranoid, Whole Lotta Love and Smoke on the Water have classic riffs.

Then a new guitar idea is presented, and the power chords shift underneath, driving the harmony towards a new and even bigger riff before the verse starts, a full 2 minutes 6 seconds into the song! Ulrich punctuates and drives with an unerring instinct for pathos, even if his timing is a tad on the sloppy side - it doesn't matter, because this is a groundbreaking approach to writing a metal song. For the 3rd time on this album. The outro is full of screaming, wailing guitars over the accented riffs, punctuating drums and Hells Bell. Marvellous stuff.

Side 1 closes with the 4th major innovation in metal on this album. Fade To Black is Metallica's first attempt at a ballad, and, unlike just about everything they did in this vein in later years, it's fantastic.

The opening reminds me of Goodbye Blue Sky from Pink Floyd's The Wall, but Kirk's solo puts a new perspective on it, and the harmony shifts around, breaking the two-chord mould - something I'd really like to hear modern Prog Metal bands doing - shaping the melody, then using a dramatic fill to link to the second section of the intro, which presents the harmonic movement of the verse, but not the melody - a crafty technique.

Just as the verse starts to feel a bit lightweight and repetitive, Metallica throw us a heavy, chunking riff, based on the rhythmic and harmonic patterns of the acoustic sounding section - but this is all about expressing the song, which raises goosebumps every time that heavy riff is brought back.

Around 3:56, when your average metal ballad would have finished or gone into the burnout, Metallica throw a new riff at us and a two-part vocal/instrumental bridge, which is built up towards a new shifting harmony and twin leads for the burn-out - and what a burn-out! Kirk's guitar ideas tend to hang around the Lynyrd Skynrd, for better or worse - with maybe a dash or two of David Gilmour, before picking up the speed, as the whole edifice takes off and the fade happens all too soon - drat Mr Rassmussen!

We flip the vinyl for more Progressive Metallic Mayhem - Trapped Under Ice is my second favourite piece from a progressive standpoint - the harmonic shift from the first riff to the second, the craftily snatched accents, the shifting backbeats (and I'm sure that's intentional, and not Lars' bad timing!) at that breaknect speed is just impossible - and again, unmatched today. The riffs feed from each other, twisting, turning, developing, changing before your eyes with a slieght of hand matched only by David Blaine - never going off tangentially, just creating, creating and then more creating. There is not a note or accent out of place in the flow of this piece - it's the nearest to perfect that Metallica ever achieved for this unique style that they created. Interestingly, listen to how similar the main riff is to Ride The Sky by Helloween. It's just possible that the whole Power Metal genre was kicked off by this one track.

Escape is another amazing track on an album lousy with amazing tracks, an anthemic singalong nestling within the dark, twisting riffs with drum accenting born from nothing but the desire to create new music. The instrumental is another vocal bridge/developing riff/melodic solo fest - listen as those riffs shift the harmonic base, strip away the foundation, then pummel it back into place, and the melodic ideas shift crazily over the top.

Next up is the Epic, Creeping Death, which, like Seek and Destroy, I played to Death (sic) in my youth, and can hardly bear to listen to it now. It's fantastic, but a bit over-repetitive in the face of the other more substantial fayre on this album. Nevertheless, a Classic on an album crawling with classics.

To round up, The Call of Cthulu is every Progger's favourite. Mine too. A quite wonderful instrumental, with Pink Floyd inspired mellowness and Metallica inspired heaviness, dramatic pathos, snarly wah-wah bass and crafty invention all round - I really don't want to pin this one down with words - it would be like finding the most unique, amazing looking butterfly ever, then gassing it to pin it into your collection.

Call of Cthulu is perfectly crafted, like haut cuisine - and demands that every single mouthful is savoured to the max - and there are a lot of mouthfuls here - much too much to absorb on first listen. Every second is accounted for and a necessary part to the overall development of the music - nothing is wasted. This is not music of the street - although it is music born of the street. It is a well-oiled machine that crushes everything in its path, takes no prisoners, and has no match in the world of metal in the early 1980s - nothing that could possibly hold a candle to this behemoth.

It's slow to develop - but that's a large part of its charm - in a world of instant gratification, where it is known that chewing food too fast is bad for the health, the same can be said for music. Music that gratifies instantly is bad for the soul and leaves nothing but an empty craving, while music that is artistically dense and requires patient listening can leave the listener satiated and ready to live some more.

Which is exactly what this album does - you leave in the knowledge that you've just heard something truly special and unique, even if you don't follow all my musical analysis.

It is that fulfulling an album.

Yes.

I like this album.

A Lot.

So much that I'm desperate to award it the full 5 stars - in fact, I can think of absolutely no good reason not too.

Except that, somehow, I just don't FEEL it as a Masterpiece of Prog - unlike its successor...

4.99999999 stars - and I'm being really cruel not rounding it up.

I'm like that :o)

by Certif1ed


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"Ten Lonely Words"

"Bright Idea"

World premiere of new Tiga's track. Listen a little sample from Pete Tong's Essential Selection.

• http://www.tiga.ca/

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• Tiga @ Beatport

Tiga Top 10 October 2008

1. Tiga - The Future / Mindimension - PIAS
2. MGMT - Kids (Soulwax Remix) - Columbia
3. Kleep - Formula One - Klang Electronic
4. ZZT - The Worm (Erol Alkan Re-Edit) - Turbo Recordings
5. Steve Lawler - 21st Century Ketchup (TG Remix) - Global Underground
6. MGMT - Electric Feel (Prince Language Remix) - Columbia
7. The Advent vs Industrialyzer - Inox - Drumcode
8. Late Of The Pier - Bathroom Gurgle (Duke Dumont Remix) - 2arcorp
9. Holger Zilske - Wrecker 06 (D.A.R.Y.L.'s Deadlined Mix) - Factor City
10. Brodinski - Oblivion (Noob Remix) - Turbo Recordings

TIGA - Sunglasses at night