Santa doesn’t hate just you: this brand new clockwork orange-juice squeezed by Peter Spilles (mastermind and frontman of Project Pitchfork) and freshly served by the winking cutie singing janitor Jinxy (the Italian sexy singer already involved in another Spilles’ side-project called Imatem, where he usually invites a lot of fellow musicians for vocal performances) after a wise alteration of nutrional values by adding electronic vitamins and just some fake blood drops (the –not so- secret recipe... ) confirms Santa’s hatred’s beared towards certain monotony, sample-centered electronic music, music mass markets and the over-lamented lack of creative individuality pervading the over-crowded playground of gothic-tinged electrified dance muzak. The fans’jaws have beeb left dry by Santa’s Christmas appetizer – the Rocket Fuel EP -, but this album entitled Crucifix Powerbomb – a wrestling throw in which the opponent is lifted up like he’s crucified on the wrestler?s shoulders and than slammed back-first down to the mat... maybe just another clownesque way to describe this project’s style! - is going to wash them and Peter Spilles broaches his cask full of loud and brutish sounds, stomping danceable beat sequences and catching tones in order to quench their thirst at the fountain of this clownish and bizarre music mark. The opener Fuck That, I’m Human is maybe the one of the funniest ("I’m not your pretty toy/I’m not what gives you joy" sung with a distorted voice by Jinxy alternated by natural vocals singing "Don’t tell me I shouldn’t scream" and so on sound perfect for a fetish party!) but if you’ll enjoy the snorting sounds of this catching track, don’t waste your cum, guys! The German-sung of Hexenpolizei fits to the more aggressive tones of this track, but it looks more conventional than the opener; even if the following track God Hides Under My Bed seems to be likewise close to classic song design, the whirling noisy vortex makes it more appreciable as Jinxy’vocal interpretation seems fuming in anger! Lovely! Other highlights of this blood-tinged clockwork orange-juice are Slime Green Spaceship (a sort of contagious electro-rock groove with nice sound trickery on a classic ebm brass obsessive alarm!), You Make Me Wanna Bang My Head Against The Wall And Not In A Good Way (... an interminable wordy title for a track featuring maybe the most provocative and erotic vocals by Jinky... I already said "don’t waste your cum", bad guys! Don’t get me angry... ), Z.O.M.B.I.E. (an ironic slamming electro march, which is going to turn you into a dancing mummy!!!), La Malia (a funny and bewitching attempt of integrating Italian lyrics on an electro track... and believe me, it’s not so easy... ) and the final fury of Bootcamp. Clownish as usual, perfectly attaining to an apocalyptic equestrian circus but really funny workout!

Third full-length album for Dupont, the Swedish duo whose members – Riccardo (vox) and Danucci (keyboards, knobs and programming) – have never concealed a feeling not so dissimilar to love for legendary bands such as Depeche Mode (they shared the vice of letting pass a remarkable time lapse between their releases – 4 years have elapsed between their debut album Ukraina and Intermezzo and other 5 years between Intermezzo and Entering The Ice Age... - record with the notorious band by Gore and Gahan!), DFA and Joy Division. The above-mentioned influences resurfaces here and there in the ten tracks introducing to the coldest age of mankind, overlapping with Dupont’s warmest creative period! It’s evident the sterling mark coming from the better ages by Depeche Mode (not the present ones in my modest opinion... ) in the introductive Run For Protection, a nice song showing Dupont’s minimalistic approach from the compositional viewpoint: a sort of sequenced march perfectly fits the melodic architecture build by a warm bassline and some "vintage" synths, an elegant warm-up before the most dance-oriented New Dawn – a real filler with his catchy melodies and vocals – and the title-track, a careful dosage of pop soapy flakes and EBM splinters co-existing in harmony! Behave speaks in a higher tone even from the stylistic viewpoint and even if we don’t understand an elephantine roar at the end of the track, we appreciated the choice of a more dramatic presence of sticking EBM nails for an order, more than just a suggestion – "Behave" indeed... standing more as an auxiliary verbs fusion... certain implicit ambiguousness seems to delight a lot of pop bands as well! -. Soulseekers will probably appreciate more melodic tracks such as Like We Never Loved (those seraphic suffocated choruses again... ), a track heavily influenced by the predictive and squared sound by New Order, or maybe the anguished Goodbye (Dupont’s wink addressed to a sound which could be unpredictably defined Teutonic seems to be ironically highlighted by the insert of the German word for "Goodbye", i.e. Aufwiedersen! ... just a detail... ) and Dope Of Love (that "Do you believe in love?...I’m losing that control... " seems standing as the most synthetic quotations of the above-mentioned influences!), another surgical artifact combining pop and bodily elements, whose mystical union seems to be celebrated even in the most robotic glossalalia of N.A.S.A., funnier and more hypnotical than Xmas led lights for all those who love 80ies-influenced bleeps. Just a little different from the previous nine tracks, Sapphire features well-crafted Dark-Wave tones and more obscure atmosphere as well as a more "choreographic" appeal! An album confirming the good quality already expressed by this Swedish band, looking from a higher floor to other monotonous EBM fellows, who often border on the ridiculous in order of looking excessively unpolished... Dupont seems to know old good manners!

Someone argues that remix album are starving the music market out of its better crops, maybe as their quality is sometimes arguable, but listening to releases like the first (of 2) step by a crowded troop of djs and musicians remixing some of the most exquisite tracks by the Argentinean band Alien Produkt, which gained a considerable notoriety by proposing a powerful mix of harsch electronics combined with hyper-propelled corrosive rhythms reminding the style by Hocico and Suicide Commando by just two release on the American renowned label BLC, is going to refute this thesis by music market analysts, even if the one related to this genre is spreading its tentacles in such a fast way it’s not so easy to follow its development. Some of the remixes included in this collection are really well-forged, having successfully reached what seems to be the main aim of the so-called "remix art" (i.e. manipulating the original track giving its own personal imprint) by highlighting the creepy atmospheres saturated by noisy thunders and foggy sounds these wary chicos explored mainly on their album entitled Ignorance: even if some of them are not so impressive – if you already know some of the lads involved in this 14-tracks EP (more than 70 minutes long...), Mechanical Moth’s banal maquillage of Slander, Retractor’s treatment of electronic oscillating trumpets and hackneyed EBm sound processing on New Concentration Camps’ remix, Y-Luk-O’s drooling vocals on Dark Visions (it seems they hired the main character of Cronenberg’s The Fly to record it) and even the hitting horrified-industrial re-assembly of Slander by Obszön Geschöpf (one of the most famous name amidst this army of remixers) could disappoint your expectations, but Asptie’s beat-fury on Into The Abyss (that kind of stuff you’ll easily enjoy in a party crowded by face-powdered and toxic blood-like cosmetics people propelled by blood corrected by tomato juice and red Campari), Drained Scorn’s nice remix of Involution as well as some make-up arts on Oscilacion Parasita (in particular those by G-Pro and Sintetik – really a good work on vocals surgical dissection! –ones) and other noticeable head-banging bounces together with the title-track, Honour Vs Falsehood (classic but well-balanced lines adding nothing but a good-manner sample to EBM encyclopedia... ) act as counterweights for their quality. A Second Step – a promising rehabilitation center hiring some renowned sound-therapists such as Dolls Of Pain and Wynardtage- has already been announced and it’s going to be issued by the Hungarian label Advoxya Records – "thanksgive" them for this nice return by Alien Produkt... -. Embellish your headphones for this forthcoming step!

It’s quite difficult not sharing the ideas by Glitterbug, Ronni Shendar and other lads thickening c.sides’ music hordes about the compositional skills of this 24 years old producer, whose musical path begun on his father’s old-fashioned computer through which he moved his very first steps towards the electronic music potentially infinite planet. The lack of any academic knowledge depending on the circumstance he lived in a secluded region has not been an obstacle for the development of its own (very melancholic) style and after some interesting excerpts on Orphanear (a sort of Dial’s sub-label, founded by Pawel aka Turner) and an astonishing release, Heights EP, for Cologne’s Ki-Records, he finally joined c.sides. The common factor of the four tracks of this ep maybe stands in the fact the listener could easily isolate all the acoustic stimuli combined within a track, but the way Christian Loeffler entwines them makes him powerless in front of its gradual sliding towards the emotive sphere resulting in a deep listening experience, beginning with the fluffy sounds, suffocated chirps, a sequenced puff at the end of rhythmical pattern motioning Cord – a track which is akin to some new definitions of techno (for clubs) recently spread by the legendary Cocoon -, whose initial mechanical gusts are propelled by a floating church organ, conferring a mystical aura to the track, and a clappy ambient-techno programming on drums; a bouncing bass drum, a metallic pit-a-pat, an absorbing monochord ultra-low tone and an impalpable resonance introduce the listener to the hypnotic progression of Glare, while there’s a sense of familiar warmth in the micromelody which seems to be emanated by a childhood memory in the lovely track giving name to this ep, Raise, akin to that kind of mood partially explored in the past by Anthony Rother. Some emotional tears are going to stream down your brain and your soul during the listening of the moving ambient miniature of the closing track, Core, potentially able to reach the core (as self-declared by the title) of the target aimed by Loeffler enchanting music. But don’t hang your head in sorrow please, human robots!

The release number 1 (generally standing as a sort of framed definition of stylistical boundaries and possible directions... call it "concept" if you prefer!) of the new born (sex undefined) baby label from Tel Aviv, False Records, has been signed by the 31 yrs old sound-morpher Til Kerlin aka Dieb, whose production skills borrowed to visual art (he collaborated mainly with esteemed visual performers such as Tomi Paasonen and Tom Neubauer) and some vinyl releases on the Italian label Citymorb – ... and he gained a certain respect in the ultra-indipendent electronic scene through them even if almost uknown... - seem to have been refined further one so that you could appreciate on this ep everything but a playset on Traktor. There are just two "Modules", the first one (numbered 0) is a deep techno movement (very close to ambient), reminding to us a sort of dance-ization of a record by Origami Galaktica remixed by Robert Hood or Akufen (!), rich in subtones, diving basslines, reverbs having a different rate of viscosity with the percussive set so as you could easily compare sounds and rhythm acting like the liquids inside the glass missile-shaped capsule of a Lava Lamp!!! The second Module (numbered 4) hold more tickling and foggy sounds, silently swarming on a 4/4 (with irregular accents disappearing just by the end of the track... ) gummy basslines... it sounds almost scary, but really atmospheric as well. This 001 release is spiced by the presence of two remixes as well: one by the Israeli producer Yair Etziony – drawing a sort of electronic shadowy dub mixing clinging and liquid sounds with a peaceful set of "muted" drones and slow sordid drums – and one by the renowned Uk electronic musician Tim Martin aka Maps & Diagrams, which obtained a rainy and luminous aggregate of ambience frequencies disassembling Module 4, something you could appreciate after a fatiguing work day. There’s some abstract tones reminding to us the era of Staedtzisism (you’ll better understand what I’m speaking about if you remember some releases issued in the beginning of the century by labels such as ~scape... ), but this first release is a good way to start a pot-purri of brand new musical scents... Enjoy it!