S.I. Futures
The Mission Statement
(Mute)
Si Begg has recorded under about the same amount of different names that Luke Vibert has, which is quite a damn few. Also known as Cabbageboy, Bigfoot, and Buckfunk 3000, Begg has also released things under his own name and now adds S.I. Futures to the ever-growing list. As one might expect from someone so prone to switching names so often, his musical output has a foot in just as many genres. Not only that, but he manages to find some free time to run three different music labels.
One thing he's always sort of been about is poking some fun at standard archetypes, and he does that again with The Mission Statement, modeling it after a big-business piece of literature in which musical tracks are laid out like a program of events and has filled the liner notes with plenty of lingo that tries to sound like it's saying a lot but at the same time manages to say nothing at all.
Musically, the disc is a big slab of disco/electro/techno/funk. After a fifteen second opening track in which a corporate announcer welcomes you to the proceedings, the disc launches into "This Is The Way," which blends some simple vocodored lyrics with a booty shaking beat, silly scratch samples and a hailstorm of blips. He keeps that trend going on "I Like That (Brand New)" on which he teams with T-Power that takes awhile to get going, but eventually drops a huge beat and a wall of rolling bass that sounds like it was pilfered from a speed garage track.
He teams up with the Bristol rap group Aspects for "All Terrain Aspects" and drops a thick, flute-backed hip-hop beat and all kinds of goofy sound-effects for one of the most successful tracks on the disc. Jumping into an even more goofy frame-of-mind, "Freestyle Disco" is one of those tracks that could easily turn into a dancefloor staple with the sampled, almost workout type commmentary and absolutely rumbling beat. It's nothing groundbreaking, but damn if it isn't fun. The same thing goes for the radio-ready "We Are Not A Rock Band," the latest in a long line of vocodor driven tracks with a steady stomping beat and a fun video. In the end, the album title and liner notes might be a little more ironic than originally planned, as when it's over, there's little more to stick to your ribs than all those overblown words that come spewing out of a middle-managers mouth during meeting time. There's nothing particularly groundbreaking, but there's still quite a bit of fun to be had, and I know that I'd much rather be listening to this than another corporate puppet.
Rating: 6.75
