Kids For Tomorrow - The Deployer EP

Kids For Tomorrow - The Deployer EP (Part2 Records, 2007) (320)

This also has Gel-Sol, along with William Mempa. It is a netlabel release that you can get for free from the website or from the links below. You should check it as it's a wildly fun ride.

Also, KFT have a new album coming out next month (Jan 2010) which I'm rather stoked for. I believe it's going to also be on Upstairs Records. Stay tuned, or check with the source.

Review from here:

kids for tomorrow - the deployer ep

I found some free music while trawling the web the other night and must say it completely blew me away!

Its an EP titled 'the deployer ep' and its by 'kids for tomorrow'.

Tracklisting is:

01. Esto Perpetua

02. Only You Can Prevent Florist Fires

03. Flasc

04. Back to Helix

05. Holy Shit! (Great Balls of Fire)

To sum it up I would say its like BOC incorporating some early FSOL sounds with sprinklings of ORBesque samples. It flows wonderfully from start to finish and takes you on journeys through relaxation, paranoia, humour and bliss.

My first hearing was one of those moments when you feel as though you have just re-discovered music (or music has just re-discovered you!).

It might have been something to do with the copious amounts of alcohol I consumed coupled with listening to it with head phones - LOUDLY - but I seriously doubt it after several more listens in the meantime.

Do your ears a favour and get this!

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Check it (label).

Various - Upstairs Recordings Remixed

Various - Upstairs Recordings Remixed (Upstairs Recordings 2008) (320)

This is has two Gel-Sol related tracks. A remix of "Cool Sweet Awesome Yay", and a Gel-Sol remix of a track by another electronic act. A lot of the rest of the songs fall into the downtempo category, which mostly bores me. A few songs are okay, but there's a couple on here (I don't remember which at this moment... track 3 for sure) that I have to immediately skip, because of the annoyance factor. So, check it out if you're so inclined.

Tracklist:

01 Solus - Session 5 (Monta Remix)

02 E.D. Swankz - Gamefazed (Ancient Astronauts Remix)

03 Telefuzz - Sayshell (Hexes & Ohs Remix)

04 Gel-Sol - Cool Sweet Awesome Yay (Maya Jane Coles Remix)

05 Bussetti - Itch (The Verbrilli Sound Remix)

06 Hexes & Ohs - Alive Until Saturday Night (Solus Re-Focus Mix)

07 The Verbrilli Sound - Moonlight Swim (Kinetic Kid Remix)

08 The Verbrilli Sound - Interstellar Spy Story (Chris J Remix)

09 The Hermit - Find Someone Who Actually Loves You (Gel-Sol Remix)

10 Telefuzz - Sayshell (Sound Capsule Remix)

11 The Verbrilli Sound - Interstellar Spy Story (Solus Remix)

12 Laura B - Ice Cold Water (Telefuzz Remix)

13 The Verbrilli Sound - Parisonic (Bonus Track)

Review from here:

This album features 12 tracks (+1 bonus track) by various artists remixing Upstairs Recordings artists and Upstairs Recordings artists remixing fellow artists from other labels. Up.Remixed is full of the deep and dreamy sounds trademarked by West coast electronica. Track after track after track, this album comes highly recommended.

Reuppage here by request.

302 Acid - 302 Acid 0005

302 Acid - 302 Acid 0005 (Even Calls) (Em-t 2005) (320)

Gel-Sol was also in the band 302 Acid for a few years and made this one great album with him in it.

Review from here:

After a long hiatus, em:t appears to be ramping up its release schedule, once again delighting us with its signature style of elegant electronics. The latest addition the em:t roster is 302 Acid, a threesome from Washington, D.C., whose premier release on em:t is a soundtrack to the dark undercurrents of the American psyche. Composed of Doug Kallmeyer, Justin Mader and Andew Reichel (who previously released a record on em:t as gel-sol), 302 Acid is the end result of the threesome's fascination with all the various bends and warps of the outer genres of modern music.

Fabricated of equal parts hardcore, prog, punk, classical and experimental electronics, Even Calls is a collision of these styles as a modern noir soundtrack, a cracked teacup ride through back alley art spaces and basement tattoo parlors. "Quest" hops and skips as a syncopated drum kit tries to rein in a series of wild keyboards that are spitting caustic melodies throughout a cavernous cistern. "AIBOC" moans with wind moving through the strings of a warped cello, a dead instrument that is borne across an empty field on the back of a percussionist and DJ who provide an elegy for the haunted instrument with a duet of drums and vinyl scratches.

"Six" begins with celestial echo of the warped cello's death song, a radio signal re-transmission of the stringed instrument, before breaking into a rhythmic downtempo piece. "I believe in magic," a voice whispers deep in the cascading space tones and crackling percussion of "Push Button," a spectral voice that explicits haunts this track but seems to embody the whole thematic structure of the record with its confession. "Mortariggus" wanders into dark ambient drone territory, unspooling as a series of vibrant vibrations filled with slippery darkness while "Nocturnum" is composed of fading bell tones, a dying signal that doesn't start very loud and decays gracefully into silence.

Even Calls is an easy record to put on the stereo; you just set the repeat to infinite and forget where it starts and ends. Your room just fills up after awhile, the shadows moving and dancing in time with the beats. Even Calls caters to the nocturnal crowd, to the lurkers after midnight who need a soundtrack to accompany their nefarious activities. This one gets played a lot in my office after the sun goes down. It makes the space less cold, less empty. Very nice.

Another review from here:

Not resting on their laurels, em:t is back with its first release for 2005 and presents a full album of the artists Doug Kallmeyer, Justin Mader and Andrew Reichel of 302 Acid. As always, em:t explores the boundaries of musical creativeness and style and this is certainly the case with the 0005 album. 302 Acid features highly complex sculptures of beeps, clicks, cuts, samples, electronics, soundscapes that together explore imaginative dark & psychedelic atmospheres. The opus comes in 12 tracks but we found the album to be more a full listening experience than just take a few tracks for a separate listen. The overal sound reminds a little of early Future Sound of London complexity and psychedelica transformed to the new millenium with clicks, buts and bleeps. The "Push Button" track is one of the heights of the album where a dark melancholic melody & beats are woven in somewhat old-skool ambient textures. Or take another amazing creature: "Road Trip to Tokyo". Dark synths, rough electronics, squirling noises & dubby beats set the mood while here and there funny Japanese vocal samples create a nice contrast. While bleepy soundscapes, hip french vocal samples on "BD Williams" take you further on the album, "Quest" again pulls all registers open for dark and hard rumbling bass & broken beats, atmospheric melancholic synths and that wonderfull mixture of early ambient sounds with today's hi-tech electronics. Finally after this very involving listening experience, Acid302 slows down with Nocturnum, a minimalistic ambient track with little bells and soft keys almost as if to say goodbye on this album.

The new em:t 302 acid album is intense and pushes the experimental envelope a little higher than the average em:t album already does. The album is not something you'll want to listen to as background music. To discover the full potential of its complexity, you will want to opt for about 60 minutes of concentration. Happy discovery!

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Gel-Sol - IZ

Gel-Sol - IZ (Psychonavigation-Upstairs 2008) (320)

This is the most recent solo work from Gel-Sol and is my favorite. I couldn't count how many times I've listened to this before falling asleep. It is truly gorgeous and has the highest recommendations.

Review from here:

Seattle-based electronic producer Andrew Reichel (aka Gel-Sol) has cultivated something of a reputation for ‘widescreen’ downtempo / ambient soundscapes, with his 2004 debut album under the production moniker on Em:t ‘1104’ calling to mind The Orb’s surreal sample-laden psychedelic flights of fancy circa ‘Adventures In The Ultraworld.’ A scant twelve months on the heels of last year’s ‘Unifactor’, this third album ‘IZ’, a joint release between the Dublin-based Psychonavigation label and Canadian imprint Upstairs sees Reichel constructing a nine-part ‘all ambient adventure’ for his niece Izabella, who was born last year. From the very outset here, the familiar melodic aesthetic heard on previous Gel-Sol albums is firmly in place in, with the opening title track introducing the lush, almost orchestrally-arranged fusion of rich ambient synth pads and flowing melodic elements, the resulting blend sitting somewhere between Pete Namlook’s similarly cosmic and beatless mid-nineties output and Tangerine Dream-style prog.

Curiously though for an album dedicated to an infant relative, while the overriding mood tends towards uplifting and optimistic territory, there’s still a trace of underlying tension and uncertainty, with the sampled sound of distant police sirens and what sounds like a homeless man creating an effective counterpoint to the bleak-sounding string swells that roll throughout ‘Mourningwok.’ It’s these vaguely unsettling undercurrents that also add an unexpectedly dark and poignant edge, such as the dark subterranean bass tones and disembodied hypnotherapy samples that float through the ominous ‘Raneboze’, and maintain the levels of intrigue whilst preventing proceedings from drifting completely away into a blissful ambient / chillout waft.

Another review from here:

IZ begins with the calm inhalation of artificial intelligence.Gel-Sol lets the sunset simmer in the pan as a warm wash of synth caresses our ears and bundles us up for our journey. This is one of those albums that makes me believe that the machine playing the CD is actually a sentient being, and we are privy to its personal dreamscape. The machine, in this case, is pretty pleased about life! Think M83’s Dead Cities, Red Seas, Lost Ghosts meets Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey (minus the menace), and you have a pretty good idea of what Gel-Sol's third album sounds like.

The opening track "IZ" bathes itself in fuzzy ocean waves and a warm pelt of synthetic chords. An oboe soars high aloft like an albatross on the solar wind. As we drift above the planet, we get a few echoey vocal acknowledgements from the host computer courteously admitting us to its subconscious. These voices are probably from obscure films, originally, but we've never seen them, so the illusion is maintained. Onward to "Mourning Wok"! We pass by a pair of alien species speaking in an indecipherable tongue on their back porch before we slide down a lugubrious river of lush, chordal melodies. IZ is heady and full of cinematic flourishes. If you've ever heard Front Line Assembly and wished they would just get off the speed and take some downers, then this album is for you.

Third track "As Far As Eye Can See" would be the hit single if they played ambient space drone on the radio. For this irresistible song, Gel-Sol ups the vibrancy by stealthily adding a muffled, bubbly bass beat along with a texture of flitting, atmospheric rhythms to get us moving at a delightful little trot. This is the only song on the record with any discernible "beat" but you’re not going to be compelled to dance unless you are a stardust-eating, ballerina panda bear, so watch the animals dance instead. On top of this pleasant, motoric rhythm a guitar hooked up to a Tesla coil does a call-and-response with a large crowd of samurai on the main deck of our dream space station (one of my favourite moments). Gel-Sol's use of samples and overlapping melodies makes for some easily-achieved synaesthesia. He manipulates his sound layers quite fluidly, and wow, I am enjoying this record!

The overall sound is a polished, psychedelic ambience, much akin to a beat-less Boards of Canada or Boom Bip. But, where those bands go "glitch," Gel-Sol goes "shimmer," especially through the middle third of IZ. Our computer friend gets to a point where it’s between sleep and waking, and it begins to breathe through its giant, metal bellows, and exhale through thousands of 16-bit vents. As if in response, a lady (Computer Gaia? Big Brother’s sister?) gets on the dream P.A. with a fairly brain-washing tone and encourages the dreaming computer that its family loves it when it dreams. At first I was really turned off by this voice, as it felt like an interruption, but I eventually forgot she was talking at all. I drifted back into the flow of slow-motion respiration, letting the voice convince me that I was safe, until I was back inside the lunar bio-dome, arms folded over my knees as I stared out the window at Earth, wondering if I'd ever return. The album is an hour in length, but I could have listened to several hours more. Once the final resolving melody, the softly spoken words of love and wash of rain faded away, I pressed play again.

There are many drone and atmospheric records that are lovely, but few really sound as major key as IZ. Certainly, Stars of the Lid are a reference point. This music is so optimistic, it could be a soundtrack to the planet that the Flaming Lips are actually from! Tropical rainstorms, submarine pings, droids singing amidst the spray of the ocean, shape-shifting birds chasing swarms of nano-bots, a metropolis from Blade Runner being bombed in the distance, and an orchestra expressed as the sigh of one string wafting its way through a galaxy - some dudes just know how to use their keyboards. In another's hands, this sound bank would reek of cheese and saccharine novice. Gel-Sol has crafted a wonderful album of songs fit for you and your computer while you both sleep peacefully, side by side, leaving our wanton civilization behind.

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Gel-Sol - Unifactor

Gel-Sol - Unifactor (Upstairs Recordings 2007) (320)

This is an fantastic follow-up to his great debut. Highly recommended!

Review from here:

Gel-Sol is an American producer, an ambient/experimental/organic sounds author of sorts. In a previous life, he has released solo work on the em:t label including 1104 and appeared on other compilations. He also collaborates with fellow em:t artists like the audio-visual collaboration of the 302 Acid project. Now, after a relocation to the Seattle area we find Gel-Sol developing his unique sound on Upstairs Recordings, a logical choice to help write his new story.

Like any good novel, the story must begin with a foreword to inform the reader of the mind journey to come. It must entice the reader and set the tone for what is about to be learned. On Unifactor, Gel-Sol begins and applies an ear-opening start with “Open Her.” This track is like flipping the first page and instantly seeing a new world. “Open Her” is layered with experimentation of soft, rolling synths. It transmits the audio waves of our human technological milestones captured by another unearthly civilization. It is a first hand glimpse into our crude world from an alien’s perspective. The ‘gel’ forms from the individual ’sol’ particles on “Brontosaur Yu” as we hear a more cohesive mixture of sounds. This second track carries the previous flow but coalesces into a well-driven beat. Definitely worth a listen. More experimentation is delivered on “Propulsion.” Here, we are pushed into the mind of a supercomputer that is performing sophisticated musical calculations. This ambient sounding track rides into a more downtempo sound with “On A Clear Night You Can See The Answer.” With the birth of this track there is no doubt he has made contact. It is a playful, well produced creation with numerous layers. Although there are many sounds to focus on here, it’s a crisp production that melds beautifully. We are equally pleased with “Cool Sweet Awesome Yay!”. We leave the atmosphere of the planet and find ourselves in the gravity-free zone. No gravity definitely increases the difficulty of listening to this track due to the overwhelming desire to groove on the dance floor. On “Cool Sweet” the sound of Gel-Sol has evolved and is a smashing gem. It follows Upstairs motto of music to evolve to and will without a doubt increase the intelligence of the species. Unifactor continues to bring a higher understanding of music production in the 21st century. Throughout the remainder, we find more of the same electronic experience from another world and we find the stars shining bright on “Mother Never Known” and “Saying Goodbye Is Never Easy.”

Gel-Sol contributes an interesting diversity with Unifactor to the roster at Upstairs Recordings. His sound is so unique but fits perfectly into the flight plan at his new label. We can only hope that this new partnership will continue to travel the universe and bring peace to help soothe the souls of all human kind.

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Gel-Sol - Music Made For You... And By You I Mean Me

Gel-Sol - Music Made For You... And By You I Mean Me (Gel-Sol Music, 2003) (320)

Gel-Sol - Gel-Sol 1104 (Em:t, 2004) (320)

Review found from an ebay auction:

Although officially known as em:t release 1104, this album also goes by the name "Music Made For You... And By You I Mean Me".

This is an absolutely stunning album. There's similarities to mid-period Orb releases, especially "Orblivion", as well as Irresistible Force and Pete Namlook's collaborations with Bill Laswell. Layers of warm, comforting synths and some dub-influenced basslines and beats, weirdo samples and a general feeling of detached, enveloping harmony. The only oddball track on this is the somewhat Squarepusher-esque "Numby Numbs", which is a bit of a breakbeat departure in the middle of the album but doesn't derail things too badly. Overall, a superb album and a welcome addition to the em:t lineup.

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