The best way to this album? Don’t read this review, listen to the disc without any pre-knowledge and try to sort out in your mind where you’d place this oeuvre within the momentary hypes and to which of the hip musicians you’d assign it to. For everyone who’d like to go this way, now is your chance to leave this text – for all the impatient: »SKA001LP« is a collection of bleeps, edgy beats, 303-basslines, 808-HipHop-breaks, bittersweet melodies and contorted sounds. Some of them are written out, but in most cases they’re just short sketches of what was supposed to be IDM, the electrification of HipHop and Bleep. The two masters hiding behind this first Skam Records album are completely unknown and fatuous at the time of its production. But only two years later, their album »Incunabula« on Warp Records will lay the foundation of Intelligent Dance Music (IDM), which will drive masses of technoheads insane. It’s 1991, and Autechre are still called Lego Feet. And still, on this so-called debut of the two lateral thinkers of electronic music, we already find all these small ideas, which will be in full bloom with Autechre: Hip Hop meets Detroit, sound experiments meet ecstatic Acid-bubbling, Hardcore celebrates between ghostly melodies, experiment is made danceable. Skam Records have re-released »SKA001LP« on CD for their 20-years anniversary in 2011. Now it’s released on vinyl again, for the first time since 1991, with 37 minutes of unpublished tracks. The Discogs-Dealers will not be amused. And the young electronic tinkerers won’t stop marveling.
Lego Feet
