Super_Collider - Raw Digits

For Howard, Super_Collider's second album, my favorite.

"The reappearance of Super_Collider's Raw Digits is timely. Recorded by Jamie Lidell with Cristian Vogel, it's a superbly wrought, imaginary robo-funk album that could only be brought into being by a process of studio dicing, stretching, compressing, inverting, processing and reprocessing. The method of its construction, Lidell conceded in The Wire 257, took its toll. Assembled between 1999 and 2001, the contrivance and the effort were more than worthwhile. Opener 'Messagesacomin', which wiggles and struggles and thrives on being denied breaking out into a fully blown beat, is like a re-reading of classic 80s Prince- not a derivative but a multiplication, a hall of mirrors expansion of the possibilities that Prince's machine sensuality suggested. Lidell's vocal submission to the elaborate constraints set up by Vogel is vital to the tension of Raw Digits. 'Gravity Rearrangin', on which the pace lets up a little, feels like a reward for the rigorous modus operandi - languid, yet fatally twisted into a new soul shape, morphing in mid-song as if to illustrate the infinite capability suggested by the title. Raw Digits marks a lonely outpost of extreme achievement in the pop universe." - David Stubbs

La Buchi

Super_Collider - Head On.

For fans of Jamie Lidell.

"Super_Collider, the head-on collaboration of Brighton-based producers (and friends) Cristian Vogel and Jamie Lidell, results in an album of delightfully skewed dance-pop. Undoubtedly accomplished only after weeks at the computer (as the haggard faces and bleary eyes on the sleeve attest), Head On consists of ten songs mashing up P-Funk- and Prince-styled vocals into an electro-shredder similar to the one employed by Autechre and Oval. Though his experimental bent is well-known, Vogel's solo productions rarely forsake the almighty beat and thankfully, it's no different here. The old-school electro beatbox is in full effect, and while that usually makes for a stark quality to any throwback affair, Vogel and Lidell throw so many goofball effects and percussion detritus into the mix that most of the tracks here sound positively beefy."



DAT ASS.