jake mandell the placekick ep press
www.x-radio.com Such a glutton is Mr. Mandell, who in recent times positively plastered the US and other climes with a blizzard of releases consisting of spiraling WHACKS and THUDS that always, somehow, culminated into coherent music. Releasing albums and EPs for the respected Worm Interface and crafty Pitchcadet labels, and now New York's Carpark, Mandell continues to push experimental beats and melodies in new directions. The Placekick EP, like his Lawnshower EP for Pitchcadet in early '99, catches Mandell riding a fine line between the chattery ends of Autechre and deeper, mellowed elements. These cuts fall one into another, flying quickly through the innards of a ticking pocket watch on "Suspended Suspiration" to "Displacement Map"'s picosecond flashes of tin and drumsticks and finally into Miami bass cocked up by bell chimes on "Azoic Trap"…all in the space of eight minutes. What's great about these quick thematic and stylistic shifts is that they're perfectly timed; Mandell has learned that the ear cannot endure ten minutes of such intense beat twisting, and thus offers on Placekick perfect portions of his rather complex musical thoughts. That, plus the clear CD has a football on it. If Carpark lives up to their promise to produce a new "Sports-Fan CD" every so often (Kid 606 is currently next on the roster), Jake Mandell's Placekick EP will be a definite mark in the win column.
-Heath Hignight
Lotus Magazine (March 2000) With highly touted releases on such prestigious labels as Worm Interface and Force Inc., as well as boutique labels Lucky Kitchen, Pitchcadet and Kodama, click-rattle-n-bleep specialist Jake Mandell is firmly entrenched as a darling of the "Intelligent Dance Music" set. Though he’s still little-known to the world at large, Mandell’s globe-spanning collection of label affiliations and rave reviews are proof that those "in the know" know Jake. (Not bad for a guy whose first EP is less than three years old.) It’s no surprise, then, that Carpark Records tabbed the Minnesota native to produce the first release in its fledgling catalog. With seven tracks clocking in under 19 minutes, the Placekick CD-EP is a bite-size sampling of Mandell’s sonic mastery. His frenetic, jungle-inspired rhythm tracks make Aphex Twin sound conventional, while his dissonant, occasionally atonal melodies can be frighteningly catchy (a bit like Mike Paradinas when he’s "on"). In fact, the disc’s most notable flaw may be its brevity. There are some damn tasty bits scattered throughout this CD—it’s a shame Jake didn’t explore some ofthem in more detail.
-Al Ritchie Lotus Rating: 7
hardwax
– 1.21.00
musical 'information overflow': finest tricky postjungle-ism,killer!
www.informativos.net
Con un CD a sus espaldas ("Parallel processes", Worm Interface), maxis
en sellos como Pitchcadet o Lucky Kitchen y temas en recopilatorios de Mille
Plateaux o Diskono, JAKE MANDELL es uno de los jóvenes creadores más
interesantes del techno underground norteamericano. Un extraño proceso creativo
que es, por simplista, mejor ignorar, le lleva a grabar miniaturas espectrales y
arritmias dislocadas próximas a la inteligencia artificial de los días de
gloria de Warp. Los dieciocho minutos aquí editados explican por qué definió
el magazine británico Wax su álbum de debut con un lacónico y explícito
"this is future music". Chapeau!.
– jesus castillo
Grooves #4 - Wherein Mandell continues his steady climb up the ladder of complex beats, tossing melodic grenades down below to discourage pursuit and doing advance scouting for promising new label Carpark. Mandell utilizes trails blazed by Autechre (the interlocking rolling beats of "Displacement Map") and Mouse on Mars ("Lorica") but soon breaks off into hostile terrain armed only with his hollowed-out beats and spontaneously evolving melodies. Mandell earns marks of distinction for his use of real English track names and the creation of one of the widest soundstages in an often supercompressed music. This short EP is best experienced as a headphone adventure, where the carefully arranged tones and stacked beats evoke a mental boot camp for starship troopers. The graphic design has something to do with Midwesterner Mandell’s love of (American) football, but the pigskin is unsurprisingly absent in the music.
-Robert Geary
Time Out New York (February 3-10, 2000) Electronic artist Mandell jumps and slithers his way through and around various sounds of IDM – a.k.a "intelligent dance music," a silly name for non-dance floor electronic music and a genre already crowded with hordes of soundalikes. Mandell, however, brings a mad scientist’s sensibility to it, looping rhythms and warping tones together in a propulsive mixture. Static-charged whirs and cool, textured beats dive and soar through melodic hums, showing that Mandell knows how to balance opposing sounds for maximum sonic effect.
- Mike Wolf
XLR8R (#40) New Yorker Todd Hyman throws his new label into gear with two fine but varied releases. First up is also first in the Carpark Sports-FAN CD series, a half-hour of limber and deft abstract beat work by Jake Mandell. Known previously for quixotic experimental drum and bass, Mandell offers Carpark carefully measured doses of deep groove, break art and a smart flavor of funk spread continuously over seven brief tracks. Placekick isn’t background listening like Mandell’s meditative Healing album, but instead demands two focused ears. Josh Presseisen’s Marumari project, on the other hand, is a softer, gentler (and longer) album, appropriately confounding in its pleasantness. "Circles" and "4 Eleven" are particularly clever, unwinding like a bedtime story that doesn’t go to plan like it should, but instead thrills with sudden percussive changes and zings of thick synth work that approach the seamlessness of Sun Electric’s later work. Taken together, Mandell and Marumari signal Carpark as a label to watch over the next year.
- Heath K. Hignight
FAQT (vol. 4 #1) If it weren’t for the fact that I’d just heard the stunning album described above (jake’s quondam current record,) I’d probably rate "the placekick ep" "great" instead of just "very good." A tale spun with sparse melody, complex mechan-organic percussion and randomous-yet-rigid programming, "placekick" delivers the goods: a deluge of prickly sputter over the vague electro skeletons that serve freeform laptop grooves like these so well. Once again, you can’t beat the way he steers a track into the less-than-obvious realms, never crashing the whole damn thing onto cliché’s rocky slopes. This EP is just another example of Jake’s mastery of art and science, so go ahead and buy it. And enjoy the cheeky football artwork, too.
- marveriq
Plastiks (#40) – na jaren gebukt te zijn gegaan onder een stroom van armbloedige Amphex-, Orbital- en Underworld copycats – dance voor college rockers – is men in de Amerikaanse dance weer toe aan een nieuwe wind. Techno voor een jazzpubliek. Zo styleert jake mandell z’n materiaal richting Autechre en Funkstorung maar krijgt het detail in het arrangement zoveel raffinement mee dat een naam als Arovane bij momenten aardig in de buurt komt. Zal z’n free jazz opleiding vast niet vreemd aan zijn. Fantastiche artwork package trouwens. ***
- madb
Oui (august 2000) – Who is this guy? Not only the best packaging of the year, but beats that’ll give you hot flashes. It seems NYC, but sounds so UK. Eso-froli-teric. Meaning sexy but in the most obtuse possible way.
Thumb (#11) – Jake cuts his sounds up in halfs and halfs again, into little metal pieces, then rhythmically spits them out like watermelon seeds, each landing precisely enough to paint a picture, dot by dot. Why does the CD look like a football? I don’t know, maybe Jake’s a jock, but it’s pretty cool looking, and his best sounding release yet.
sound (june 2000) – a peins le temps de souffler que ce bon jake mandell revient avec un nouvel objet bizarre sous le bras. Cette fois, il s’ agit du premier ep d’une serie thematique du label Carpark! Ou un ballon orne la face superieure du cd (hem! la chute du Nasdaq auraitelle entraine une poussee d’infantilite tardive chez certains?)
jake ouvre les feux avec un splendide ballon de football americain. Et, bien sur, les sept titres de cet EP n’ont pas le moindre rapport, de pres ou de loin, avec ce sport. Ou alors en imaginant deux equipes de steve austin mortvivants s’ affronter sur un flipper geant dans un film de jeunesse de cronenberg. Apres un exercise de style detonnant chez force inc., plongee dans une nouvelle experience assez troublante, les mouse on mars sont a l’enterrement de leur meilleur ami; aphex twin a de l’arthrose aux mains et se met a chialer sur son clavier; les residents passent de paisibles apres-midi a jouer du xylophone dans leur asile…brrrr…
la banque de sons de jake semble infinie. Pour tituber, comme pour s’effondrer. L’entonnoir a placer sur le sommet de votre tete n’est pas fourni avec le disque. Etrange…
- olivier plumey
Ink19 - This is a cute little 3" CD from one of the more creative electronic experimentalists around. This 18+ minute CD comprises a continuation of some of Mandell's earlier drum n' bass work. But this is no standard "let's chop up the Amen break" type beat works. Mandell has a supreme sense of composition of melodies and rhythm and is able to cluster intricate blocks of sound.
The Placekick EP may be one of the busiest electronic beat albums I own. None of the beats ever stays in one place for very long; they rebound off of the walls while the melodies jitter across the floor. Mandell's actual sounds are as original as the beats. Unlike so many artists, I can't figure out which overused piece of gear these sounds come from. There may be 303's 808's, and DX-7's here, but they are cleverly disguised enough that the listener doesn't even notice.
This EP leaves one itching for more.
- nirav soni
ONE OF THE ARTISTS who's picked up on similar ideals is 24-year-old Minneapolis resident Jake Mandell, whose impressionistic sound sculptures owe plenty to Mouse on Mars' inventions. Mandell's earliest works, scattered across a series of limited-edition compilations on painfully hip micro-indie labels (Lucky Kitchen's Blip, Bleep [Soundtracks to Imaginary Videogames], Diksono's I'm So Bored with the USA), culminated in his debut, Parallel Processes, released at the beginning of 1999 on London's Worm Interface label. Parallel, like Mandell's earlier work, is both bracing and engaging: post-drum-and-bass that stutters and flops but never loses its pulse. One of Mandell's achievements is that, unlike many of his Aphex Twin/Autechre-influenced peers, his music actually has a pulse, though only a Twister adept could even try to dance to it. His beats shift constantly, and yet finding your way into them takes little effort, and his just-as-continually contorting melodies and timbres are themselves rewarding.
Mandell's winning way with a sine wave (he composes his music using sound-tools programs and a pair of computers) keep the rewards coming on two new releases that, despite the mere month separating their introduction, are dramatically different. The latter is Quondam Current, his second full-length, released by the highly respected Frankfurt label Force Inc. Quondam's pulse is further to the fore, largely due to his abandoning quasi-jungle rhythms for straighter techno beats. The results are moodier and, sadly, less playful: Mandell's once-plentiful sonic/melodic ideas are in shorter supply, and often he sounds like he's still trying to figure out how to adopt his quirks to 4/4 without falling out of rhythm. This first step into new territory is occasionally wonderful (the breakbeat breakout in the middle of "Enchanted Philter," the twisted Detroit techno-isms of "Emulsified Essature"), but far more tentative.
Far better is its predecessor, the football-shaped Placekick EP (on New York indie Carpark), which serves as a sort of coda for Parallel Processes. With only seven tracks in under 19 minutes, the EP might seem like a throwaway, but Placekick is Mandell's most stately accomplishment. If Toma and St. Werner conjure colorful 3-D fantasias, Placekick is altogether darker, though not ostentatiously so. And in fine IDM tradition, the titles tell the story--the EP's "Displacement Map," "Suspended Suspiration," "Sunday Rain," or the album's "Rubber Rock" and "Chrome Plaiting." Less onomatopoeically poetic than Mouse on Mars, to be sure, but highly appropriate nevertheless.
- MICHAELANGELO MATOS