Grant Beran – The Man In The High Castle
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Download The Another Ones
I picked this up a few years back and never reviewed it (stupid). Then I played a track from it on the short lived (and hopefully soon to be revived) AGB Radio last fall. Apparently Grant noticed when I posted the playlist for the show and he contacted me, pointing out that his album The Another Ones was available for free on archive.org because it’s under a CC license. So I’m not sure if you can still buy this CD or not, but I thought it was relevant enough to make it an OOPs post.
The Another Ones is a textured walk down warped vinyl lane. Beran is a master of turntablism, crafting gritty and distorted jams that sound like Philip Jeck teamed up with Eric Copeland. It’s a bizarre combination for sure, one I don’t think I ever would have thought of on my own but TOTALLY fucking pumped that exists. Some of the tracks have a drugged poppy beat winding through like an underground synth played at a troll party in a B-movie, others are wind chime backyard factory burners, there’s haunted flame drone, muffled Muzak, alien industrial techno, and falling electro stars played through high hissing tape. These songs sound like they’ve been roofied and dragged through a tar pit, putting up the mildest resistance while forced to dance in a hazy disco cave, everything stretched out to a taffy like drone. So fucking cool on every level, each song just as fucked up as the last.
It feels weird calling this a sample based album because nothing is recognizable and everything is wicked twisted but all the sounds Beran is conjuring seem like they’re coming from ancient dusty debased records so there’s really no way around it. Either way, “all the music has been created using a very old record player, second hand microphones, discarded tape recorders and various bits of wire.” AND IT’S FREE. Good job, Grant Beran.