A Shocking Hobby

Amazon.com
In the background of "Balk Acid," the fourth song on Speedy J's fourth album, you can hear a reminder of the music this Rotterdam-based techno producer used to make. A series of gently ambient synth chords deliberately climb their way up and down the scale, evoking the placidity of a savanna at night. The foreground is where the wild things are. Breakbeats scurry about, flame on, flame out. Nasty breakbeats at that: clipped, tuned to pitches that scrape against the ear, distorted almost to the point of absurdity. But unlike the similar experiments of Mike Paradinas or Aphex Twin, they don't move at a frantic junglistic pace. They move ever so slowly, at the blunted tempos gangsta rap favored before Timbaland and the electrofied Dirty South redefined the game. J, a.k.a. Jochem Papp, juggles the formula a bit, emphasizing the ambient here or the industrial there, but the deliberation and painstaking effort that have marked his career (four albums in eight years--and that's not counting the decade he spent DJ'ing and learning his craft before he dropped his debut) is evident throughout. So evident, in fact, that the dance-floor culture that once spawned him most likely no longer knows what to do with his music. But that probably tells us more about dance floors than it does about him. --Jeff Salamon

Tracks:

Terre Zippy
Borax
Ferber Mudd
Balk Acid
Drill
Caligula
Vopak
Actor Nine
Sabina Seat
Amoco Cadiz
Manhasset

Amazon.com

In the background of "Balk Acid," the fourth song on Speedy J's fourth album, you can hear a reminder of the music this Rotterdam-based techno producer used to make. A series of gently ambient synth chords deliberately climb their way up and down the scale, evoking the placidity of a savanna at night. The foreground is where the wild things are. Breakbeats scurry about, flame on, flame out. Nasty breakbeats at that: clipped, tuned to pitches that scrape against the ear, distorted almost to the point of absurdity. But unlike the similar experiments of Mike Paradinas or Aphex Twin, they don't move at a frantic junglistic pace. They move ever so slowly, at the blunted tempos gangsta rap favored before Timbaland and the electrofied Dirty South redefined the game. J, a.k.a. Jochem Papp, juggles the formula a bit, emphasizing the ambient here or the industrial there, but the deliberation and painstaking effort that have marked his career (four albums in eight years--and that's not counting the decade he spent DJ'ing and learning his craft before he dropped his debut) is evident throughout. So evident, in fact, that the dance-floor culture that once spawned him most likely no longer knows what to do with his music. But that probably tells us more about dance floors than it does about him. --Jeff Salamon

Customer Reviews:

Creepy and Intense! I love it!.......2004-07-15

For Halloween last year I decided to stay home and hand out candy to trick or treaters. So I decked out my house with numerous strobe lights indoors and outdoors, and put this album in a boombox outside on repeat. It looked like an evil science experiment gone wrong. I must have scared the S#!T out of these kids cause they would walk up my drive way but freak out when I lurked out with my friends to give them candy. I guess this album works better than those retarded sound effect tapes you get at Spencers! Ha ha. All else aside... this album is pretty f---ing cool. Love listening to it when I'm feeling introspective or broody. If your into Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, or Autechre you'll love this album. I do. Get it.

Terrible poignancy.......2003-10-20

As the mixed reviews for this recording attest, there is some music, like this, that performs personality tests more adroitly than other music. This is not music for the faint of heart. Nor is it music for a mind with pat, simple understandings of how the world works, for this music rips away veneers and propels the listener into a worldview that simply requires an understanding of how complexity and conscious understanding collide in a terrible liberating embrace. Good dance music has a wonderful role to play in some individuals' personalities, but that role (played by some other Speedy J recordings) is only distantly related to the almost horrific intensity of this probing, incisive electronic investigation of desperately intense sonic and emotional landscapes. Step in! Don't mind that heavy, viscous fluid that seems to flow over and around you; that clings to you and shimmers so irresistibly in some foreign light, making your skin and your very thoughts translucent with revelation. If your brain can't wrap itself around darkness and transform it into light, if you can't find softness in intensely harsh and unremitting aural assaults, if you can't grasp a totality that includes pleasure and pain, if you can't find enormous poignancy in a musical vision of life that performs liberation and a salvation out of radically acknowledging the difficulty and the complexity of the world, then this is not music that's likely to appeal to you, much less make the slightest bit of sense. There's a level of engagement required here to synchronize with music that by any conventional designations would be described as harsh, dissonant, abrasive, pulverizing, relentlessly aggressive, and just plain annoyingly noisy. To each their own. This recording is a transformation and an act of commitment given shape and form in sounds of terrible acknowledgement and revelatory power. There's great joy in the depths for those who won't fear the darkness.

This is really good Industrial!.......2003-08-30

Speedy J is an interesting artist. He has many sides. This is the first album that I believe was mass produced in the marketing attempt for a larger following. For me, it is the first one I listened to and bought. Speedy J is musically EXTREMELY astute. He has the potential to be many things: Hard Rockin', Ambient, etc. Overall I feel that Public Energy No. 1 is an overall better record, but this one is really good too. Not as much ambient attempts here, which is what makes Public Energy so inviting, but some GREAT overall work here.

People have Bashed him lately but then again, he takes chances. His 2002 release that features his drum & percussion expertise is more narrow than this record. Some of the cuts are mixed for the Industrial audience and some are not. This is a really great spin!

Interesting..........2003-04-29

Jochem has brutally twisted all his sonic textures again, and the result is one of the most interesting releases lately. Industrial-influenced techno and ambien-ish soundscapes with overdriven rhytmic patterns rule here but somehow Mr. Speedy seems to make sense with all this noise.
Shocking indeed if you're after bubbling trance-techno like his first album, but if you're into something not quite straight forward, this is the album to get.

SO SO.......2002-03-18