Mushi/Lumpy/Musique Concrète - A Bug, Touhou, and Honey Milk (Poisoned)

 

Mushi/Lumpy/Musique Concrète

A Bug, Touhou, and Honey Milk (Poisoned)

[ Mushi/Lumpy/Musique Concrète; 2006]

9.0

For a fan of DnB, especially of the experimental variety, Comiket, Reitaisai, etc. prove to be a barren wasteland for fans of the genre. However, every now and then, an album like A Bug, Touhou, and Honey Milk (Poisoned) will be unearthed, perhaps several years after the original release date. Drum and bass and ambient is freakishly hard to come by as is in the doujin community, much less an entire Touhou remix album dedicated to the genre(s).

The nature of the album is mostly rooted in breakbeats while being remarkably diverse. The album opens up with Ultimate☆8bitCrash's chiptune breaks. Deep Forest exchanges chiptune for ambient featuring breaks and beats which are reminiscent of µ-Ziq’s Mouse Bums from Bilious Paths, and ぶれいくこあ? sounds like a ragtime performance gone awry. 最モ危険ナ童遊ビ is basically what Kid's Festival ~ Innocent Treasures would have sounded like if Venetian Snares did the music for Perfect Cherry Blossom. misT is a cluster of drill and bass blasts and scratchy distorted melodies, which, quite frankly, becomes dull quickly while 門番の知られざる17年 -E't'B- proves interesting despite being done in a similar style.

This album also has remixes of remixes, such as the high point of this release dnabgub kaerB, which knows not the meaning of the word "calm" and greets you by kicking you in the fucking face with a chaotic splicing job of JAZZ 2005’s 我儘お嬢様の為の Bigband, making it sound so different that one could confuse it as an original track for the first half out of the context of the album. The closing track Cirno foolish! is also a remix of a remix of Scarlet Destiny’s Cirno Stylish, featuring much cleaner sample rips than the former, mixed in with somewhat lo-fi breaks and synths.

The album takes detour from the drum and bass breaks and trades it in for a more ambient feel with wwrriiggggllee, which is tied with dnabgub kaerB for my favorite, but is on the complete opposite end of the music spectrum, being an ambient piece with intensive sampling (one of which being David Bowie's Neuköln of "Heroes" fame) and no beats. The following track tele-phony terror (i wanted to believe it) is on the same page, but develops a beat after scaring the piss out of you. The soft glitch Enter Fire Power begins the transition that leads us out of the atmospheric nature of the previous two tracks.

After three tracks, we are brought back to chiptune breaks with 夜折り折り折り折り折り, only for Unlimited Voyage 1480 to throw us a curve ball by giving us another remix of a remix, this time being of hardcore artist t+pazolite’s Unlimited Spark!, featuring the same editing styling seen from dnabgub kaerB mixed with a Hardcore bass beat. Preceding Cirno foolish!, we have DEMY, the poster boy of the album providing us with various genre elements we have experienced from the past dozen tracks.

Now that we have an idea what you will be getting into when listening to this album, how does it stack up musically? In my opinion: Really damn well. It might be me just getting tired of the dime-a-dozen trance and rock arranges out there, or perhaps it’s because I have a very biased favoritism for experimental drum and bass artists like Squarepusher and Aphex Twin, but this was like an oasis in the middle of a desert for me. With fourteen tracks and a wide variety of genre fields covered, it can withstand multiple listens, which is just as important as simply being a good album, and with a length of nearly an hour, it needs to be varied. Any other album of similar length rooting itself in a single genre would be hurt from replaying. The track order in A Bug, Touhou, and Honey Milk (Poisoned) changes it up enough to remain appealing from start to finish.

The abrasive and bipolar nature of ABT&HM(P) traps your attention in a vice grip and puts you on a wild journey that very few doujin albums can provide. Even if you disregard "doujin standards", it's fucking remarkable. This is just not your typical Touhou remix album, but also a 57 minute-long lecture on what remixing should be: Breaking songs down and rebuilding them from the ground up as you see fit.