haven't really got into Isolee's recent tracks on Mule / Dial but if its got the Koze stamp of approval it should be sweet!

wasn't his previous album called We Are Monster, without the S at the end?

excited for this.

That's been fixed now, thanks!

seems like i will continue buying every pampa release on sight...

Looking forward to this! A fantastic producer and great young label equals pocket aces!

Mmm, too bad i cant put it on my wishlist for Santa ... :-)

MickeyRat likes this

Woohoo, been waiting for so long for a new Isolee album

Wow, this should be awesome!

F I N A L L Y

Very much looking forward to this.

Expect 3* RA review.

awesome, Isolee rocs

looking forward to this!

yay I've been waiting!

And Rajko - not Raijko

i'm jumping through my room while listening to the first bits on this video-sharing website. can't wait for this to be released. hopefully there will be a presale at smallville record store!

This album is great.

Pampa is fast becoming one of my favourite labels.

goooooood

Outstanding LP, outstanding label.

the review sounds odd/off ..especially the ending.. couldn't even understand what the reviewer was trying to say....

some real DOPE bits on the LP. sounds more clubby than we r monster to me..

I think the review is bang on...

It's definitely a grower and much better than what I expected on the first listen. But I can understand why the people who loved We Are Monster are so off on this one.

Taktell sounds good, but i need more bass groove

Quality stuff all over right there, with some epic tracks like Celeste.

Another RA awful review where most of the article is dedicated to some biographic details and little focus is given on actually analyzing the material in question.

Lovely album btw.

je l'ai acheté aujourd'hui mais je ne l'ai pas encore écouter!!! j'ecoute la derniere compil de chez bpitch a l'heure ou j'ecris mon commentaire!!!

I did Not get the Message of this review! Sorry. Sometimes it helps to describe it in simple words. Thank you.

Btw: I like the album but it needed to listen it more then once.

What a shit review...instead of reviewing Isolee's past review the damn music please.

Welcome back Isolee! 'Thirteen Times An Hour' is a corker, 'Taktell' jacks along nicely and there's plenty of twists and turns along the way on this LP. Good stuff.

poor review, an artist's past should not be its benchmark. I really like what Isolée has done here. It gives him a new appeal, some kind of edge, similar to what villalobos produces. I think he has done exactly what he had to do to get in touch with a new audience, unlike what the review says.
Labeling 'Isolée=Beau mot plage' is the worst thing you could do to him.

5/5

It's a freaking piece of art!

totally agree with previous posts....instead of rambling on about the past and showing how much you know about minimal why don't you just write a review.....it's a gorgeous album on its own terms....the fact that it's isolée's new album only makes it even more pleasurable...

Stellar review! Really puts the finger on the problem with this album. Its a great album in its own right (I listen to it constantly these days), but compared with the quality, the shock and awe if you will, of past releases it's not as endearing or compelling. It's not his best work. I nevertheless would've given it a 4, but that's just me.

You can't say everything an artist ever did was a stupendous success equal to or exceeding past successes. Some works are better than others. And if you can't judge an artist by her/his career, what can you judge them by? Social, historical, political, and yes even professional contexts are very important to art and music. I read somewhere Isolee himself said this album was a return to past sounds a la Rest. Such a statement begs comparison to previous work.

The reviewer made no effort to label Isolee. Show me where the reviewer says 'Isolee=Beau Mot Plage'. One of the main themes of the review is Isolee is incomparable, so the only things to which you can compare this or any of his new releases are his own previous works. Maybe you should try to comprehend more of what you read instead of shooting your mouths off because the reviewer didn't like what you love.

If you want a flowery, verbose blow by blow of how the music made the reviewer "feel" or what this or that sound might be described in words as, you can find all that trite, empty language in fucking pitchfork. Some things can't be put into words.

Reading this review, one gets the impression that it's an extract from a history of ''microhouse'' that the reviewer is working on, pasted here to bulk out the word count, a mould into which Mr Muller will be squeezed; while its tone of nostalgic disappointment, its implicit territorializion, construes the work as a museum-piece falling short of worthiness for some imagined canon or other, artists like Isolee are already off elsewhere, tracing out a new land. ''You can dance if you want to, if you want to...''

If you like music creamy and piped down your throat, to the point of nausea, by the manic, gluttonous Chefs of the culture industry, then avoid this album. Likewise, if you want the studied, arch, dead-end minimalism of a style with nowhere left to turn save the quasi-fascist fascination with the power of sound design in and of itself, then avoid this album and go and kiss the speakers in some superclub. If, however, you have the imagination to forge grooves in the desert with the meagrest of resources - a rattlesnake, the scratch of your shoe on the gravel, the billowing wind, the crescendo and diminuendo of a passing truck, a bird (a sad dove?), a parasol for the glare - then Isolee is, as always, waiting for you there with a mojito....

I take it your big into Matmos, Twerk, Matthew Herbert, and labels like Touch, editions mego, and miasmah? That makes two of us.

Now see, here's a critique of the review I can dig, even though I disagree. Very thoughtful, well focused, and eloquent. Yet, I think you are wrong.

The reviewer never implied you can canonize Isolee's work. In fact the opposite. I read the review as a contextualization of Isolee's work, with the point being that you can't contextualize it at all except when comparing it to his past works. Some have called his works the first microhouse. Other's have tried to use a bevy of other styles and subgenres to fit Isolee's round peg into a square hole. The reviewer's bottom line is you can't do so, at least not easily. It's a matter of trying to compare IM Pei to renaissance architects or comparing Andy Warhol to the Impressionists, apples to oranges; all are in the same class, but that's where the similarity ends. All you have to characterize the sound of this album through comparison to similar works is Isolee's own previous work.

And in that context, I agree with the reviewer ("It's my prerogative!"), no matter how you want to verbalize the soundscape it forms, this album is not as impressive as Rest or We Are Monster. Its awesome and I love it, and its going to fit nicely on my shelf, and I'll pull it down probably as often as I do Rest and We Are Monster. But if I had to choose which of the three to save in a fire and I could only save two, Well Spent Youth would go up in flames. Well Spent Youth has all of the groove, vigor and intellectual appeal of both previous albums, but unlike both previous albums it lacks tiny harmonies and melodies. Both Rest and We Are Monster had amazing harmonies and melodies that sneaked up on the listener amid the carefully choreographed microsounds, bass, and rhythms, until suddenly you had tunes like Logiciel, Music... or Enrico and Pillowtalk blazing away with satisfying, recognizable melodies built from slowly synchronized, oscillating atonal sound progressions. To me those tracks always felt like they started with me in a pitch dark room and I could only see light showing around the edges of the room's door. The light got brighter as the harmonies and melodies unfolded until suddenly the door was flung open and the room was bathed in brightness. Well Spent Youth chucks melody out the window for the most part and replaces it with off key caterwaul. I like the difference, but there's plenty of Peter Van Hoesen, Marcel Dettman, and Porter Ricks-type amelodic techno to go around already. This certainly puts all of those amelodic homies to bed, but I'm just into that stuff as much as his earlier efforts.

I also think you're drawing a hyperbolic, false comparison in your last paragraph. True, Isolee is not for those who live in the middle of the road or spend their days getting loved up by Pauls Van Dyk and Oakenfold. But Isolee is also a master at sound design, fringe experimentalism, and creamy club tunes. His best work combines aspects of all three to perfection leaving everyone else in the dust. This album does not combine those elements as well as past albums did, although its still a great album. Therefore, to me, it is a minor work in comparison to past works.

I like it.

Wow, an eloquent and impassioned riposte! Definitely deserving of a reply. Probably best to follow your points, but I should first confess that I am no musical expert (probably only capable of the impressionistic, quasi-philosophic thoughts of my previous post), even lacking the vocabulary to adequately express my very lay feelings (thus, my pop at "sound design" probably missed its intended target: namely, a lot of the yawn-inducing 'modern' minimalist stuff, perhaps impressive in its brute material aspect, like Hawtin, like Nuremburg, but lacking soul...). Hopefully, that should contextualize my reply. Anyway...

...Herbert I like, but the others have barely rippled the surface of my consciousness. However, I will check them out, for sure! As it happens, I'm probably most moved by 'wrong house', beatdown (Pepe Bradock, Theo, KDJ, Henrik, I:Cube, yes Isolee...latterly DJ Koze, Vakula, Lawrence), and assorted Detroit/-ian stuff (Carl Craig, early Recloose, Swayzak, Drexciya, Claro Intelecto...). Swing or strings. Jazz more than disco. Off kilter, out of step...

I accept many of the the points you make about the review, about Isolee - however, I still believe too much of the reviewer's respect is implicit ("auteur" notwithstanding). I think a figure of the stature of Isolee requires explicit recognition. Not to construct a 'majoritarian' counter-canon, you understand; merely out of respect for someone who continues to set the benchmark and produce stimulating material such as the latest album. It could be argued that the mere act of comparison - either extrinsic (to other artists) or intrinsic (to prior works) - is already to canonize... Perhaps my thoughts were too defensive...?

At any rate, you're right, I probably did traduce the review. Lazy. Straw man. Renders much of what I say redundant. I probably looked too hard at the comments rather than reading the review. I have re-read it ("it is only when you re-read that you read for the first time") and it's not as condemnatory or harsh as I imagined. Apologies, Mr Miller. I think the source of my ire/misreading was the observation that it was "lacking hair-raisers like 'Beau Mot Plage,' 'Tout Se Complique' or 'Schrapnell''' - had I any hair, I'm sure it'd have been raised by 'Celeste', 'Goin Nowhere', 'One Box', or 'Hold On'... Certainly don't find it "amelodic", or a "caterwaul", as do you.

Anyway, I very much suspect that, at bottom, we are constructing our baroque 'reasoned' arguments to justify something of another order: namely, a passion, a disposition, a simple unconscious connection, arising, as ever, from a singular context... So, to 'confess' something of the album's initial 'conditions of reception' at my end: when I posted, I had listened to Well Spent Youth twice, on a decent system and in a room with good acoustics. I was frantically finishing a PhD thesis. The break was most welcome, motivating even... I haven't been able (or tried) to assimilate it to the rest of his oeuvre - better or worse than Rest or We Are Monster? - largely because it's not a very interesting thing to do. A violence, maybe. On their own terms: I didn't really dig We Are Monster, I f**kin' loved Rest. What I will say is that, on his remix work alone (Holy Garage, Ark, Villalobos, Ripperton, Osborne, Snooze, Mickey Moonlight, Pantytec, Sex in Dallas, Paolo Olarte, Tiga, Lawrence, Wahoo, Roy Davis Jr), Isolee is definitely Champions League material, an "auteur" indeed, a genius, against whom so much quirk-free, overcoded (''minimalism'' and other genre-lizations), funkless drudgery pales into insignificance (a comparison, yes; but not trying to pretend otherwise).

Lastly, my final paragraph, and its "hyperbolic" images, was aimed at the wider music-listening public. Probably should have qualified the statement, especially given that those who do swallow Simon Cowell's cream are hardly likely to be reading reviews of microhouse auteurs...

Actually, the previous paragraph should start "penultimately" - this is ''lastly'': a thought, the epigraph I have just used for my thesis. I think it's appropriate:

''Logical analysis, like any thought or perception, grasps its ‘object’ from a particular angle, and attributes it potentials that it did not previously have… The thing ‘in itself’ is only the sum total of the graspings to which it lends itself, a set of angles of potential intervention by outside bodies. All thought and perception are therefore partial, in the double sense that they are never all-encompassing, and that they follow on a constitutional affinity, or mutual openness, of two bodies for one another… Thought-perception is a foray by one body into another’s essence in such a way as the second is carried outside itself. Thought-perception reaches into things, launches them up through the atmosphere of language, and in the same motion returns them, altered, into the depths of matter''

Lovely album, and some of the most interesting 4/4 dance music released as of late.

Quite a response, flabdance. I hope your dissertation defense goes as well as your RA commentary defense. I like your epigraph, especially. Perhaps you might consider recording yourself reading it aloud, adding an overwhelming four/four jack beat, some decayed double time high hat, and a little synth harmony. I'm not being facetious. It would make for some badass vocal jack house a la Legowelt's "furniture" off of Dark Days or Minilogue's Doiicie Side A.

If you don't know Matmos, Twerk or the labels Touch, Editions Mego, or Miasmah, based on your earlier description of Isolee's use of imagined found sounds like walking through the desert, the grains of sand bouncing off of weathered sandals etc, I would suggest you check out Matmos' "A Chance to Cut Is a Chance to Cure," an IDM oddysey using the sounds of plastic surgery as its basis, Twerk's "Living Vicariously through Burnt Bread," a techno/IDM study of sounds you hear at breakfast, pretty much any of Christian Fennesz's works for Touch and Editions Mego, which are awesome explorations of experimental guitar squall, but particularly Venice on touch and Endless Summer (Fennesz's favorite of his own work) on Editions Mego; and finally Jacaszek's Treny on Miasmah which is more like classical music than techno, but imagine if Beethoven had been composing on synthesizers using Ableton. There are lots of other great artists and albums of imagined soundscapes to be had on touch, for instance anything early by biosphere (I particularly enjoy Substrata and Cirque though Dropsonde is pretty cool too) or anything by Phillip Jeck.

I should warn you, none of these sound anything like Isolee, but they're still transcendent examples (in this electronic music geek's humble opinion) of soundscapes sculpted from fascinatingly unexpected realms of the real.

Break a leg defending your dissertation and happy crate digging!

@ Bareklik

Thanks for the good wishes and especially the musical suggestions. Not sure my preference is for music that's too cerebral (prefer Herbert's Around the House to Plat du Jour, for instance), but am happy to play everything loud - or at the appropriate level - at least once! And have dug AFX, Vibert, Plaid, Boards, Autechre, et al in the past. L'aventure commence...

Transmission is a real headfuk!

There's not much that's more cerebral than Autechre, homey. Agreed Around the House is way better than Plat du Jour, but it also features a great deal of found sounds. Plat took that found sound aesthetic to such a level of absurdity that it became unappealing. If you can dig Autechre though, I think you'll really dig the Twerk record. Its more Around the House than Plat du Jour. Breakfast made listenable. And give that Fennesz album a try. It's way, way out there, but sitting on the beach on a sunny day listening to Endless Summer...experimental electronic music doesn't get much better than that.

genius

5/5

GREAT ALBUM -> FULL SUPPORT!!!

positively...