Sold out at source before the ink even had time to dry on the insert labels, latest to the Dark Outside release roster, a 100 only cassette from Blood Everywhere entitled ‘enthusiasm’. Something of a sore thumb in the TDO community, ‘enthusiasm’ is easily the most accessible Dark Outside release to date with Blood Everywhere seemingly happy to mess with your head to turn in an outing that unexpectedly removes and relocates itself to a finishing point that’s far from where it starts in so much as what opens this collection (‘honey’) with its prowling and brooding countenance and VHS era dystopian bleakness – read ‘blade runner’ as were reimagined by a Pye Corner Audio styled future visioning. In sharp contrast, how it ends is another matter, for the oceanic cosmic touches that grace the parting ‘Wifes’ are tinged and tweaked with a subtle melancholy which between the porcelain bookends something of a youthful KLF mosaic plays out that’s coloured and coded by flotillas of 808 State like industry longingly retooled by Free School. In truth, Blood Everywhere operates in a unique vacuum, a musical magpie of sorts who bends, bleeds and bypasses the usual generic stereotyping, whether by happy accident or deliberate design creating a mushrooming mirror ball of 70’s, 80’s and 90’s club land reminisces. All this becomes immediately apparent when the aptly titled ‘serious disco’ veers into listening environs, subtly trading a futuristic surveillance vibe, this amorphous shape shifter mutates like nothing we’ve heard since the days of the debuting Die Wilde Jagd platter for Bureau B a few years ago, acquiring to its multi lingual palette an array of reference markers drawn from Studio 54, kosmische, space disco and dark minimalist tech of the Detroit kind. In short it recalls those mash up collage broadcasts aired via Mary Ann Hobbs’ Breezeblock sessions or the guest DJ mixes done for Peel in the late 90’s. via ‘Enthusiasm’, Blood Everywhere literally provides a vibrant playground of sound which at various points takes in late 70’s funk cultures (‘Choices / FBU’) one I’m suspecting for the Lo-Five crew, psychotronic techno via the Shamen-esque ‘the receiving end’, late 70’s space disco (‘fruit machine’) and Plaid-esque grooves (‘do it again’) a cut that appears stuck on such an early 90’s euphoric high you sense it still hasn’t come down from yet. Phew. www.darkoutside.co.uk
the sunday experience 