Dadamnphreaknoizphunk - Take Off da Hot Sweater (2002)

Review by Joshua Glazer: Recording as Hardfloor, Oliver Bondzio and Ramon Zenker are responsible for some of the most hair-raising acid cuts to come out of Germany during the heyday of rave culture. As Dadamnphreaknoizphunk, the pair explore the chill side of electronic music, resulting in a jazzy trip-hop sound that seems to be the complete antithesis of their mind-bending dance attacks. The common thread between this seemingly irreconcilable duality is that most classic of electronic music machines, the Roland TB-303. And while the tiny silver box has done for dance music what the distortion pedal did for rock & roll, Bondzio and Zenker bring the machine's alien squelching sound home with them, melding it with more typical jazz and hip-hop samples to create downtempo tracks with a fluid groove that spaces out the otherwise blunted rhythms. "Custommade Sneakers" joins a repetitive acid blurb with subdued organ flourishes while "Complex Dinner Wardrobe" uses the 303 itself to achieve its melodic ends with overlaid acid lines that sound like Plastikman if he were to employ a funk drummer. For fans of downtempo licks, Dadamnphreaknoizphunk offer something new to the sound cannon. For the die-hard acid fetishist, Take Off da Hot Sweater is the perfect post-party return to Earth without sacrificing the otherworldly edge of the previous night.