Studio Pagol leading team member Marc Van Eyck's solo venture translates his main band's verb into a more agnostic and disillusioned version of minimal electronic music. Stripped of vocal performances (per say) and of the most obvious world music influences, Marc's own offering is a lot darker and mysterious. Squared minimal-techno beats, noise-polluted layering, scary sound reiterations, alien rhythmical figures, screaming tucked away distorted guitars and at times even plain old simplistic arcadic computer music. Personally I prefer the first half of the record over the second: the first three tracks seem stronger, more thought out, better arranged and more just sound like they have more to communicate. This is more like what you'd expect from some Warp, some M-Tronic or some Hive records releases.

Chicago-based New York City-originating eccentric project Atomica will trigger memories of the best record of urban downtempo, orchestral trip hop and female-fronted pop-electronica that the nineties have given us. The trio's bold and nonchalant approach to the matter evokes rapturing scenarios of fresh yet nostalgic tunes enriched by intense and passionate vocals and visionary lyricism. Portishead, Conjure One (these two above everyone else), Lamb, Bethany Curve, Taxi, Drop the Fear, Rebro and other bands of that type jump to mind immediately, but their music is so un-derivative and eclectic that I am sure you'll be thinking of loads more names that would complement that sentence quite nicely. Atomica have a lot of potential. Emotional and truth-transpiring lyrics, skilled and well-rounded song-writing, powerul and full sound... maybe the only thing they miss to make it big time is a couple of catchy hooks that I'll remember and be singing after listening to "Metropolitan" a couple of times. Atomica is definitely a band that I'd say is worth checking out.

With punk attitude and electro impetuosity Tying Tiffany pack, with the help of Lorenzo Montana' (one of the label Suoni Di Jato's bosses), thirty minutes of raw ironic music. The thirteen songs (most of them are short ones that hardly have a lenght of three minutes) sound simple and direct like punk anthems and some of them show a really ironic edge. Songs like "LCD Soundsystem is playing at my house", "I wanna be your mp3" or "Telekoma" show really well this side: with the use of titles linked with other bands (LCD Soundsystem or Stooges) or with "Telekoma"'s fifty seconds craziness where gabber rhythms are mixed with toy sounds. Guitars, analog sounds, samples are well mixed and they create catchy songs. At a first listening the sound could seems really simple but after few times you realize that it sounds simple because Lorenzo did a good production job. Tying Tiffany is a multifaceted person which beside playing music and djing she also modeled for a book and she acted into "La lingua del santo" movie. If you are in need of half hour of electro punk music with a dance attitude, try this one!

I was wondering a bit that there was no further release for this trio from Germany on the Scanner/Dark Dimensions label. Here is the reason, SKORBUT did change the flag and they're now signed to Sonic-X, which remains still a young and faithful German label, always in search for something special in this overpopulated music genre. With the signing of SKORBUT they have indeed made a strong step out of the dark and they should soon be able to reach wider international recognition with more releases like this. SKORBUT offer us 12 new tracks well written and produced in their own unique style. While they do not invent a new wheel, I am impressed how they are able to combine known elements influenced by older EBM classics with some modern and up-to-date bass lines and drum patterns. Especially the drum patterns received a lot of effort and get often distorted without falling into any Powernoise-like themes. The vocals presented here remind me a bit of the ones done by SECOND VOICE for example. The music is a detailed produced kind of EBM/Electro anthems which also does not forget to fill in some more slower tracks as well. Especially to the end of this new CD the tracks are slowing down and give a wider insight in the almost strict side of this music genre on tracks like "Evakuierung der Seele". Dancefloor smashers are of course well present here with "Hypostase" or "Toxic Jesus". So we have here a nice old-school Electro/Industrial album which luckily avoids all too much heard elements of the current presented Hellektro thing. Please take also a look to the nice comic strip "Morbid Inc." in the artwork of this CD. Nice work – keep it on!

This is a new and special limited edition of 1000 exemplars of this Danish/German friendship project. They are already active since more than 10 years, started as a solo effort by Torben Schmidt, who is also the label chief of the German Infacted-Recordings. With his decision to place Jimmy Machon of the Danish Electro/Metal-Crossover act GODHEADS as a permanent singer, he later on earned that respect and recognition this project earns finally. So this new sign of activity behind this is long awaited and LoE supporters will catch this limited edition ASAP. I personally have some issues with the presented stuff here which I don’t like to hide. This Maxi-CD consists only of the title plus a cover version of a Rock classic of Chris Isaac’s "Wicked Game". The title track itself is a good and remarkable one, here presented in four different versions. I like the decent bass line sequencing richly presented in the original version, but also the SUPREME COURT remix is well arranged. I find it a bit unnecessary to offer here this track in four different versions, the more I must ask the sense and meaning behind this cover version. Well, Jimmy proves here that he is able with his nice voice to start a serious competition to the original, but I rather expect to see LIGHTS OF EUPHORIA to be guests at the next episode of "Deutschland sucht den Superstar" or a different casting show. With this cover they would have winning chances! So if this act counts to your personal favorites, you’ll then have to hurry up to get it (note: it is limited to only 1000 exemplars worldwide...). I personally think that this release is globally a bit thin, especially in times of a economical recession in a scene filled with students and jobless employers – and so with a limited budget. I hope that both, audience and band will think on this term...