Meat Beat Manifesto
Actual Sounds And Voices
(Nothing)
There aren't too many artists that are prolific and consistently excellent in the work that they produce, but Jack Dangers would definitely have to be one of them. He released his first album 10 years ago, when The Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers weren't even a thought, and has inspired countless groups since then. Not only has he been an inspiration, but his own music has grown and changed as well over the years from hard-edged industrial/hip-hop (99%) to politically-charged dance and sound collage (Satyricon) to epic concept album (Subliminal Sandwich). If you don't own anything by him and you enjoy electronic music, you really owe it to yourself to go out and listen to a release of his.
I read an article recently in which Dangers confessed to having a record collection of over 10,000 albums. Besides the obvious problem of cataloging and storage, when listening to him talk about them it's easy to hear that he has a huge range of influences. Like always, his music shows this eclecticism, but the wide variety never seems to tug too much and make things feel thrown-together. At 73+ minutes, Actual Sounds And Voices is another listen that takes awhile to digest fully. It starts out proper on track 2 with "Prime Audio Soup" and goes through sampling fun ("The Tweak"), classic Dangers electronic/hip-hop ("Funny Feeling") and even a sort of jazz improv ("The Thumb"). While the latter track lingers on a bit too long, it shows that Dangers can mix just about anything (even a rather goofy saxaphone solo in this case) and make it sound pretty good. While it isn't quite the opus that Subliminal Sandwich was, it's another solid album from a pioneer.
Rating: 7.5
