Mike Shannon – Reset, Bleep

Mike Shannon has been knocking them out via labels like Plus8 and ~scape for a long time now, and with ‘Reset, Bleep’ he reboots his Cynosure imprint after a couple of year’s break.

‘Bleep Back’ is a grumpy warbling duck of a track, its Dan Bell-style dirty wriggles juxtaposed with a sleazy human element that’s generated by natural-sounding claps and a mutated vocal query to entreat “Don’t you think it’s time to jack?”, but it also rides atop a subtle, driving bass undercarriage to prove much more than the sum of its parts.  

When Shannon starts to massage the machines, easing the wavetable into atavistic forms, the track just breezes through its six minutes.

The PR blurb for ‘Serge Up’ trumpets its genesis, as it makes use of the Serge Modular System, but in layman’s terms it’s another winner as it makes use of further swung hi hats and staccato low-end parps.  In short, it’s a ‘housey house’ elbows-out sort of number, much like its predecessor.

Closer ‘Bleep Forward’ is a reinterpretation of the opener in collaboration with Evan Baggs. While it’s no slouch, it sacrifices clarity and close-focus for a widescreen image of delays and maximalism, so for me it’s the weakest of the three.

You can pick this album up now at Juno.