Yum Yum Club: Music For The Rave
The latest Yum Yum Club release never disappoints, and on Sprechen, why would it? Hedonistic tech-heads on a blinding, psyche trip, as much Section 25 bright and wired spikiness as Model 500 cool futurism. As much Shitkatapult as Strictly. By Ryan Walker.
There’s a consistency to Sprechen Records that should, if a fan of…well a fan of consistency, be admired either upfront or from afar. A record label keeping ahead of the curve without cutting corners, sharp enough as it is to cut through whatever comes up through the woodwork, from under the floorboards; always ones for, upon playfully arresting the attention span of the digital-disco age, high in the ethers of the internet, captivating the imagination.
Sprechen’s recent release drives this point home perfectly with um Yum Yum Club’s new single. One, the one, this one, with That Trippy Vocal Track, shooting a bright beam of hot light through a basement shrouded in steam, a blissful veil of mist sliced open by strobes, brains deflated to party balloons with wonky noises and rib-kicking bass, impulsive and seductive like a lover’s touch that feels like a kick in the nuts, a dream frequency that reverberates through your very being and in doing so, with every fat, dark blast and scorching bleep, turns the bones to butter.
It suggests there is more to life than revising the latest Trainline updates. And within that thick mist, that dirty, seductive murkiness, is a frenzy of electric skeletons liberated by the unbroken grooves, sparkling when sprinkled with surprising, psychedelic atmospherics to unveil an image of a potent, psychological Detriot mirroring the inexorable, industrial clamour and dramatic atmospherics of the world that whirls around them…essentially Tony Humprie’s Zanzibar colliding with The Haçienda’s Hot.
They have no choice. Not when coming into contact with a twitchy little gem like this one. It’s a pure reason to explore and evolve.
It’s something the producer/producers (who knows/cares) Yum Yum Club is renowned for…anonymously keeping us excited and engaged like the wizard behind the sheet, the figures floating behind the horizon-wide scaffolding cloak.
An advocate and exponent for this notion that it’s all about acid, all about the rave, all about the thrill of the chase, the speed and precision of the massive drill, rather than what’s found at the rainbow’s stinkin’ end, rather than what resides radiating in the core of the earth.
A straight, solid pulse incapable of crumbling carries the tune along, no matter the size or supposed strength of what it rolls into. A slick rhythm of immense spirit, brimming with new details, new depths, upon repeated listens.
Second on the single is A Piano Rave, which crashes into action like a fat slab of something stripped of all fat galvanised into new life ala thunderous handclaps and sizzling strips of steel in the massive, metallic frying pan. Piano sample and simulated audience cheer, massive drums, and knob-turning to keep the wounds slightly raw, slightly bloody. In other words, the staple minerals, the essential matter-of-fact parts, of so many timeless house classics, limitless acid classics that scratch the paint of whatever surrounds it, all perfectly interlinked, harmonious, and chiming.
Because what good is a fucking house track without a damn grand piano? Not good. What good is one without a voice…THE voice? A voice spreading some kind of gospel, a seductive mantra to be written on the wall of millions? Not good. What good is an acid house track without the injection of a TR-303 or the 808 to compose warehouse symphonies or motorway symposiums for the masses across the Atlantic and/or intergalactic? Not good.
If it lacks, it loses.
But this track slams. It wins.
This is excited and easy. Speedy and digestible. Vigorous and supercharged. Electric with a demented edge. A tease without end. A mad rapture of samples reproducing the illusion of having more strings to add to one’s bow, but really the configurations have been altered, the elements melted to be manipulated and moulded to do new things to the old school soul, and our states of mind along with it when kneeling at the altar of such a timeless, classic goodie bag.
Nothing but good things in what we find familiar. What we know will be the best thing we have listened to because of what’s listed on the tin. Honest but never obvious. Just cool. The joy of an everlasting noise that both cruises along and crashes into action in the way it does here, stylishly energised and revised like scholastic scriptures and fed in purely new contexts. Chemical euphoria in metropolitan hotspots buried belowground, but always gonna, gotta, eventually burst. Aware of what it is, what it does, what it was built for, where it came from.
They have been played twice on the roll-on Jaguar Worldwide’s show on Radio 1 Dance as a part of BBC Introducing. This EP and the two tunes on it follow their cracking track featuring Maria Uzor of Sink Ya Teeth on vocals. Chosen by Jodie Harsh as her Dancefloor Moment pick on the show, An Acid Love Feel, in all its hooked, scuzzy seductiveness, its ESG-on-E punk throb, its enchanting cyber-dance routine, in all its glorious Moroder-signed-to-Transmat action, can be heard on their fabulous compilations Edgy Future Discotheque (Vol.3 in this case).
As it can also be heard here.
Music For The Rave by Yum Yum Club
A contemporary kinship shared between Sprechen, Sink Ya Teeth, Yum Yum Club and A Certain Ratio is one that totally feels right. Feels news. Feels now. The map of Manchester representing the whole of a global, musical landscape (again) locked into and lost on, the same traits of socially, spiritually, and hedonistically ascending above and beyond the illnesses and the ailments of a silently stagnating, rotting vegetable patch otherwise known as Planet Earth. Acts of the weekend anarchists with a situations swagger who, whilst performing for each other in aircraft hangers that echo into endlessness, are capable of raising themselves out of, and above the stars stuck in the sewers. Of rejoicing briefly, through electronic composition. Factory on Mars with a slick, shit-hot disco edit. Chicago house throbbing with bolts of tubular bollocks and melodies lighter than air, surprising like a ray of light, but also judder, jump, and erupt, as though they comprise the crystal structure of alpha titanium alloys.
Now though, somehow slicker and stickier than before, it pounces and punches with unrelenting sequences of a bass supernova. Marching parades and dazzling patterns of drums unsticking a host of objects from the ceiling like a spatula to the cheeseburger sleeping on some old grill.
All however are evidence of a pattern developing when discussing the mutually appreciated musical chops shared between Sprechen and Yum Yum Club; that there is little originality in An Idea; but an abundance of it in the conflation of many.
The reinvention of the wheel is a futile ideal. So much work can be done with so little when a subtle number on the blueprints has been changed, a minor shuffle, a subtle adjustment, a development of experiments, the free trial of the zeitgeist long past. The reinvention of that wheel again is justifiably able to be renounced when there are plenty of things to pour over (grooves of rejuvenated capability, cosmic clouds of colour, sizzling bits of signals and bites of light in the microcosm of a small basement that taps into a specific nerve, the centre of everything, a particular pulse that technologised time has turned its nose to, it’s back on, replaced, subsided or possibly forgotten).
We enjoy acid for a reason. It embodies the vinyl form as a vessel able to take us elsewhere, anywhere, a cosmic capsule caught between time and space with an ability to oscillate, to rollerskate, to summersault between each.
Reconfigured to release this a monster of a record, this peak scene rave and connected rebellion pulsating from within the dustbins of inner-city indie discos, this is acid of a kind, newly realised.
That was, and still is, the funk, the future.
Juno Download on 27th April as exclusive.
General release out 11th May.
A record label from the North West of England, Sprechen is a platform to showcase electronic music designed for the dance floor. With a passion for melody, groove, soul & energy with no limitations of style and a diverse release policy.
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Ryan Walker is a writer from Bolton. His archive can be found online here.
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