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viewing 1 To 12 of 12 items
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12"
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EF 076EP
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Portland based producer Strategy is back on Endless Flight. Strategy has released on Kranky, 100% Silk and Further Record among others. Endless Flight have always enjoyed his unique house music and ambient stuff. Tuff Life contains four killer low-fi house tracks. It's probably his most club friendly record.
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LP
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FUR 101LP
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180-gram LP. Includes printed inner sleeve. Like some ingenious combination of John Cage's chance operations and the numbers station data stream captured on The Conet Project, Strategy's Information Pollution immerses listeners in baffling sonic waters. It's a riveting work that converts the enigmatic effluvia of shortwave and dispatch radio chatter into thrumming, static-riddled clouds of ambience. An undercurrent of unease wafts through Information Pollution's four lengthy tracks, as barely audible molecules of aural junk never meant for public consumption are repurposed into an unsettling strain of inverted chillout music. Information Pollution was born out of restraints. After moving into a new house with little space to set up his studio properly, Strategy (Portland producer Paul Dickow) could only work with a few devices at a time. He'd acquired an old Akai reel-to-reel tape deck with tube preamps from his father, who'd recently cleaned out his own studio. Using radios, homemade effects boxes, and the tape deck, Strategy recorded these sound collages live to tape, without touching any synths or deploying any samples. "I discovered a lot of ghostly shortwave sounds," Dickow says, "but also ambulance, parking, and school bus dispatch channels on forgotten frequencies that I think might have been once used for police or broadcast TV." The result falls somewhere between Philip Jeck's eroding turntable symphonies and William Basinski's poignantly decaying Disintegration Loops. Dickow explains that he uses the term "Information Pollution" to classify "any spam, broadcast saturation, junk mail, invasion of unwanted information [that enters] the socialemotional public realm." As with the material Strategy created with cassette tape loops on his previous Further release, 2015's Noise Tape Self (FUR 096LP), "there's a sense of machines having their own life, beyond our control." But instead of chaos, Strategy has produced an artful alchemization of discarded tones. Although Information Pollution sounds unlike anything in Strategy's sprawling catalog, he likens the album to his activities within Portland's '90s/early-'00s experimental/noise scene. The reason he hasn't issued anything in this style till now? He wanted to wait until he was sure he'd "given it the necessary rigor and study." With this album, Strategy has shaped the random output of radios into a gripping document. As Dickow puts it, "This is the audio equivalent of photographing the oil slicks that appear in the puddles of parking lots."
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LP
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FUR 096LP
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Working with a quiet intensity since 2003, Strategy has proven himself to be an incredibly resourceful and rewarding musician in both group settings and as a solo artist. In the latter guise, this Portland, Oregon producer/multi-instrumentalist (aka Paul Dickow) has released a prolific amount of excellent work for quality indie labels such as Kranky, Idle Hands, 100% Silk, Endless Flight, and Entr'acte, putting a cerebral yet sensual spin on dub, ambient, post rock, and house music. For his Further Records debut, Noise Tape Self, Strategy delves ever deeper into his more ambient inclinations and experiments with tape loops. Dickow says he became obsessed with making tape music in 2008, after tiring of using the computer as his main instrument. Fellow Portland producer/ingenious gear-tinkerer David Chandler (Solenoid) taught Dickow "how to make a tape loop that could be put inside a cassette tape. I got really into this, and got a 4 track, knowing this would allow me to have four synchronized loops per tape. I would then run each channel through a series of effects and 'perform' live mixes using the loops. I alternated between using source material of my own devising and using whatever source material happened to be on the cassettes I was hacking." Noise Tape Self kicks off with "Awesome Piano," in which a fragment of a beautiful piano motif gets overwhelmed by a glorious vortex of static and distortion. "Cassette Loop" is a gorgeous ambient piece with a lulling, aquatic quality that recalls such masters of uneasy listening as Rapoon, O Yuki Conjugate, and Aube. "Ominous Lovely Piano" is a ghostly, microcosmic form of dub, an ultimate kind of headphone music of deep psychedelic interiority that's reminiscent of Paul Schütze's 1996 masterpiece, Apart. The hypnotic/amniotic ambience of "Lovely Loop" whispers of a peaceful eternity; this track could be an important step toward a new, improved strain of new age. The album closes with "Rhen's Loop"; here's where the album really soars into the stratosphere and grows surreal wings. A five-dimensional headfuck of what sounds like analog-synth growls and whirs and desolate drones, "Rhen's Loop" is Doppler effected and disorienting, like a more somber take on Conrad Schnitzler's Ballet Statique (MINIMAL 004CD/LP). With Noise Tape Self, Strategy has found a way to build works of compelling, intimate grandeur with some of the humblest of sonic atoms. It's an alchemical wonder. Mastered by Pete Swanson and cut by CGB @ Dubplates & Mastering.
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12"
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EF 050EP
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Portland producer Strategy is back with two unique house cuts. His wide-ranging music has been released by 100% Silk, Kranky, and by Endless Flight. "Luna" is hard to categorize, but it sorta sounds like a Detroit techno remix of synth-pop. "The Saga" features his trademark dubby house sound, but it's a bit more gorgeous and uplifting.
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12"
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SILK 021EP
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"Prince of Portland Paul Dickow turns his no-nonsense Nudge-sludge awesomeness into revved-up, avant tech-house arousal as Strategy. The moniker has found Dickow checking out hooks in his Community Library and niche-in'-out nooks on Kranky. With SILK he separates: 'Skanking Stabs' stomps with reverb canned-can drums, bouncing in a dancehall vault. 'Feel The Earth' is not your daddy's acid jazz, with its bouncing house arresting piano bar tipped jar. 'Starry Day' soft serves up a swirl of '80s vamp funk, contempo computer chocolate chips, and haywire Cyberdyne scheming sequences. The dueling 'Bolly Valve' tracks mix Arabic woodwind skill scales with whisper sizzle clatter data. Limited edition, with hot pink pop art Neu-bout-town jackets designed by the artist. Strategic move for winning your love."
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12"
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EF 038EP
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Strategy returns with two excellent, alternative house tracks. "The Fixer" is unique mixture of dubby house and a kind of Italo disco sound. If you like the music of Caribou's Daphni or Four Tet, you will like this song. The B-side, "Another Rain," is Krautrock-oriented house meets Thomas Fehlmann -- it's for Four Tet, Prins Thomas or Lo Soul fans.
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12"
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CL 015EP
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"Following hot on the heels of his breakthrough Future Rock CD album for Kranky, Community Library is proud to bring you a proper vinyl single containing two of its key tunes. Future Rock is simply Strategy's breakthrough album -- a pastiche of hundreds of musicological reference points tied together in massive swells of bass, spring reverb, vocoded haze, and echoes; the album seems to play on every field, being a functional ambient experimental pop record on low volume, and bass heavy dance-dub when cranked up to full volume. Following on the latter idea, we took two of the CD's most propulsive cuts and sent them over to Berlin's D&M to be rendered as a proper clubmusicplatter. The album's title track 'Future Rock' takes the A-side, welding techno, Afrobeat, and outer space jazz elements to a rocking core of breaks, live drumming, and a superlow bassline. Backed by a curtain of sound that is virtually a tribute to Vladislav Delay's or Basic Channel's most classic, blue moments, this song is the missing link between live drum syncopation and dub-techno spectra. 'Can't Roll Back,' is a little more openly referential, throwing a huge number of styles into a 4/4 stomper. Following a spectral vocal intro, percussion, loads of keyboards, and guitar build into a massive track that is part electric-era Miles Davis and part early A Certain Ratio. Reconfigured for dance DJs, this version features a proper bass drum and an extended, dubbed-out outro, including Strategy's first ever searing psych-rock guitar solo. For fans, this represents an exploded view of two of the album's highlights; for DJs who have been in tune with anything that's crossing the line between live and programmed (DFA, Gomma, Nonplace, Kitsune) this single is a totally new angle-casting away stiff standards of punk-funk-disco backbeats in favor of brave new recombinations with dub techno, live syncopation, and arcing riffage."
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12"
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DRK 014EP
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"Strategy is on a roll and Dreck is very pleased to release a follow-up EP to his fantastic Future Rock album, which came out earlier this year on Kranky to much critical acclaim. Strategy continues to blend different genres and influences, creating very organic and unique sounding tracks that meander between dub, house and techno culminating in analog warmth and love. 'Pacific Agenda' on the A-side kicks off with Profan-like offbeat stabs only then to surprise with lovely Rhodes keys and hand-played percussion. The flip side's 'Julydub' is a dubby house track drenched in spring reverb and carried by an incredibly deep bassline. Strategy is Portland based Paul Dickow, who's been making a name for himself as a producer, DJ and curator of Community Library, a record label he runs with David Chandler (aka Solenoid) which releases music varying from house to noise. Paul has recorded for various labels including ORAC and Kranky, he has also remixed tracks for DFA and Tigerbeat6 to name just a few."
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CD
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KRANK 108CD
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"Three years have passed since Drumsolo's Delight, and Strategy finally comes forward with a new full-length. His third album to date, Future Rock focuses Strategy's diverse interests into a single point, while still drawing directly from the dense, shimmering sonic language established on Delight. Based on a refined studio process that incorporates multi-tracked live instrumentation, archaic synthesizer equipment, archived recordings of improvisations and band practices, digital sound design, and sound of non-musical origin, the album is a polyglot solution of genres. Musical quotations, discrete sonic jokes, and skewed musicological impressions are blended into a dream-like, impressionistic musical composite which confounds and compounds music's past, present, and future. A gauzy, vibrating curtain of sound, much like the one that made Drumsolo's so distinctive, ties together all the songs as do the signature Wurlitzer electric piano and old-school spring reverb. Incorporating compositions that have taken years to develop, a handful of close collaborators (including his cohorts from the band Nudge), and using source material that dates as far back as 2000, Future Rock is easily Strategy's most complex, narrative, ambitious and overtly 'pop' record to date; as well, it's practically a thesis statement for his vision of a genre-free musical world. To date, you've heard Strategy dabble in everything from headphone-oriented ambient music to house and dub; this is the work that brings it all together."
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12"
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ORAC 022EP
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Strategy takes off into deep Detroit-influenced house territory on "Fields of May," and the result is a foggy, hypnotic, heavy track. The DSP trickery is still in evidence, but takes a backseat here to a more organic sound. A serious late-night burner which fans of Moodymann or The Mole ought to dig. Secondo's remix ups the energy level a bit, taking it into techno-house territory. The last track is a spiky and gorgeous experiment in ambient techno/dub. Headphones? Check. Spliff? Check.
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12"
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ORAC 010EP
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"'Super Vamp' is hi-tension funk, strung tightly between its classic influences and exploratory production techniques. A classic disco vamp drawn out relentlessly in a techno mode. The result is funky as hell, and one of those great bridge tracks which can take a set from one genre to another. It's also got a great vitality which comes from strategy applying his homemade cut-up software live in the mix. Nudge's version uses the vamp as the skeleton of a pop song, a beautiful and unexpected move. The hazy, nostalgic-future mix paints a picture of a basement full of gear, lovingly tended, and two quiet but very intent vocalists. If Windy & Carl tried their hands at making house music, the result might be something like this. Solenoid makes an epic electro-disco version of the track, with abundant musicality and a great dancefloor flow."
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CD
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KRANK 066CD
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"The second album Paul Dickow has made under the name Strategy. Dickow was a fan of synth-pop who simultaneously learned to play keyboards, the drums and program. He went on to drum in the art punk outfit Emergency, play keyboards in Fontanelle and multiple instruments in Nudge. Strategy wires together Dickow's programming and performing experience via a hodgepodge of table top electronics, computers and real-time musicianship. Combining a granular ambient aesthetic with an abstract, percolating rhythmic sensibility, Strategy unites small parts into complete melodies motivated by complex pulsations."
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viewing 1 To 12 of 12 items
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