Released in 2000, Mille Plateaux’s Clicks & Cuts 1 was a revelation. You mean it’s okay to leave that digital popping sound on the end of the sample? Oh there are lots of European producers (and a few in the Bay Area) making drum kits out of just the digital pop?! Philip Sherburne’s thoughts from the lengthy liner notes of Clicks & Cuts 2 (2001):

“To create click-music is to harness failure, whether the crackling of the patch cord or the system-crash in mid-sample…Where (Intel cofounder Gordon E.) Moore’s Law dares musicians to max out their processors and perfection is always just a compile away, the click cuts through to asymptote to the ideal.”

Sherburne further asserts that this isn’t an electronica sub-genre (i.e. Techno, House, Electro), but “a movement, a shared inclination or perhaps a disinclination, a collective approach to discontinuity”. And with anything that represents a cultural change, pundits of this series often tend to ignore the actual music and instead fixate on the extra-musical intent, criticizing each subsequent C&C collection as a path further away from the original idea.

Volume five is no exception.

This installment reflects the story of the species as told by the offspring of late ‘90s pioneers in the “scene”; though loosely grounded in the ideas Glitch, the original antiseptic sterility of sine tones and wandering detritus are largely replaced by relatively youthful – almost muscular – methods. After a misfiring intro of hard drive caching (Scattertape’s “Shelving A Tempered String”), Aoki Takamasa sets your head nodding with a swaggering ghetto-hop rhythm under fuzzy melodies, sub-bass and broken vocal accents (“RN4-09 (Short Version)”). Manathol’s “BAKETO” sets phasers on “stab” for a hyperactive battle scene reminiscent of that time the arcade owners doubled the speed of the Missile Command machine; Loom borrows Stefan Betke’s (Pole) dub for “Isolex 03”, amplifying the latter’s trademark cloud synth blobs over a faded, lugubrious treatment of the Amen Break. Lodsb’s “Eve” begins with timid, subtle washes but soon slips to danceably slinky to Wax Trax industrial to spastic break-core meets operatic. There are several vintage Oval-esque chillers from kiyo (“Bear In. Warm-Noiz”), Gultskra & Artikler (“w”) and Marow (”e.coli”) but these present themselves in a more immediate, less cerebral / process-driven fashion.

Is this new management (folded due to bankruptcy in 2004, Mille Plateaux was recently revived under new ownership) a natural progression or a bastard? People still have this conversation when discussing Mozart, John Cage, Mark Rothko, Andy Warhol etc. I will leave you with that.

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