Peter Hope & the Exploding Mind - Love is for Others (2021)

Peter Hope records under many names depending on the general thrust of the material, and this latest expression of the Exploding Mind seems to represent a convergence of all the different strands, bolting the gonzo electronics of No Scene, or even the Hot Crow on the Wrong Hand Side album, to the dirty acid of pH2. Obviously this won't make any fucking sense whatsoever unless you're already familiar with a few of these names, so let's start at the beginning.

Older boys and girls may recall Hope as vocalist for the Box and therefore part of that whole Sheffield scene. He's worked with Richard H. Kirk. In fact he seems to have worked with pretty much everyone at some point, and now he lives and records in a seemingly wild corner of New Zealand, at least judging by the photographs. The photographs in question often seem to feature himself building things out of massive rocks with his own bare hands, walls and possibly even his actual house; or this could simply be an impression I've picked up from the music, because it doesn't sound like the work of someone who fears either wilderness or the sort of tough, gut-busting labour necessary for carving out an existence therein. Love is for Others, wherein Hope collaborates with Toby Barrow, is mostly electronic - excepting, I suppose, the heavily treated vocals - but it somehow doesn't feel it, or at least it doesn't feel like anything politely composed on a screen. The rhythms, if clearly originated from some box or other, resemble a cargo cult version of techno formed from rocks, wood, and bits of metal smashed together - programmed with dirt under the fingernails. Everything is overdriven or distorted without turning into either death metal or power electronics, somehow retaining enough of an identity to reveal distant roots in acid house - and so much so as to allow for contributions from the characteristically excellent Mrs. Dink without anything sticking out, if you'll pardon the expression.

If it's still unclear what I'm talking about, I suppose we could call it modern blues via Suicide, or maybe even Chrome, nailed to a rough as fuck acid beat and probably recorded far too loud, which is why it works so well. There's nothing clean here, and it's sort of the opposite of vapourwave in that respect, but better than I've probably made that sound. I've always thought the traditional inducement to play it loud, as often featured on the gramophone recordings of my increasingly distant youth seemed something of an overcompensation, but it would be justified with this one which is nothing if not a proper window rattler, and should be appreciated as such.

Peter Hope & David Harrow - Wrong Acid EP (2019)

At the risk of turning this enterprise into something resembling Disney's Mouseketeers but with Peter Hope as the point of focus, here's yet another one on the grounds that he keeps sticking stuff out and it's usually decent, and I therefore keep buying it. Wrong Acid represents, as you might expect, a further helping of acid, techno, or whatever else you might feel like calling it in the vein of Gut Acid from 2017. Actually Wrong Acid borrows both Muthaload and Planet Wrong from the aforementioned, presumably remixed - I found it difficult to tell, but the information you need is that taken as a whole this seems a somehow darker, punchier set which surfs that crest of a pharmaceutical wave which never quite decides whether it's coming down on the side of euphoria, or if you've just signed up for a really shitty trip; but the repetition keeps us going. It's edgily hypnotic, as you might expect, belonging to the whole acid thing without sounding like it's simply duplicating all the right noises. Unusually for this sort of music, at least in my experience, most of the tracks are vocal cuts urging the rest of us to spend all that energy on fighting the power, so it's acid with the feel of punk rock as was, or as it should have turned out - jagged and trippy and resistant to coercion; which works because the vocals are heavily treated and share the space with all the weirdy effects and surges rather than dominating as a more traditional vocal might. The result, should you need any further point of reference, reminds me a little of Underworld, although it should probably be noted that I only really know Born Slippy due to it having appeared on the Trainspotting soundtrack.

As a sort of pendant, or possibly an epilogue, KinetiK Records of Greece issued a lathe cut 7" by Hope and Harrow more or less contemporaneous to Wrong Acid - two tracks, Feel with Fear and Love on the other side. You can tell these came from the same people but the mood is more sombre, positively downtempo, yet with that same feel of digital so dirty you could quite easily mistake it for analogue. Being a lathe cut record, there's a limit to the run, but they still had copies here at time of writing, so you'd be advised to move quickly if you want one - and you should if you have any fucking taste whatsoever.

Someone really needs to throw money at this man and start getting this stuff preserved on vinyl for the benefit of future generations.

pH2 - Gut Acid (2017)

For the sake of argument, let's assume our understanding of music works like language. You're born, you learn to make noises, you learn to imitate words and phrases, and eventually you learn what they mean and are hopefully able to arrange them in sequences of your own composition. I say hopefully because I'm not convinced everyone gets all the way with that last stage, and some seem to be stalled, having no need to express anything much beyond what they can say with a few stock phrases; and so it is with music, which is why there will always be artists who sound more like tribute acts than anything in their own right. It's easy enough to work out why such and such a piece of music has a certain sound, and how to duplicate it, and that's what most people tend to do.

Peter Hope, on the other hand, seems to have a particular insight in so much as that first and foremost he understands what music does, how it works, even before we've got to the instrumentation or the notes. Both Hot Crow on the Wrong Hand Side and Destroy Before Leaving had pure strains of blues and even jazz running through their DNA without necessarily imitating anything; and now there's Gut Acid, another wild tangent spun from a similar understanding, albeit an understanding of something completely removed from pastures in which the Box or Exploding Mind did their thing. As I understand it, Gut Acid came in part from tracks issued as Criminal Face and originally recorded at the height of acid house at the tail end of the eighties, along with more recent material expanding on the same in collaboration with DJ Parrot and David Harrow. So it's vintage material, or in the spirit of vintage material, or possibly both, but the important thing is that it sounds fucking great right now.

In the wake of acid house, as it all turned to techno or went Balearic or whatever, the bargain bins filled with failed acid, records which missed the target because they'd never quite understood what they were trying to do in the first place, imitating a sound and in imitating it, somehow ending up resembling one of those fucking awful 12" extended mixes some Trevor Horn impersonator routinely pooped out for every shit band going. The lesson in this was that not anyone could cut a dance record after all, and certainly not acid house. Gut Acid uses a few of the same boxes you may recall from Phuture and those guys, and there's the occasional non-tune representing the equivalent of a keyboard smash on a Roland TB303, but as with Hope's other efforts, this is a long way from the methodology of Noel Gallagher pretending to be a Beatle, and there is a lot here which you won't have heard before; but what he duplicates, and which he gets absolutely spot on is the feel of acid, the spirit, the euphoric bubble up and surge seasoned with a hint of something dark. These eight tracks pound and hypnotise, inviting even the most sober and drug free amongst us to concentrate on mesmeric glitches and details.

I'd say more but there's only so much point to writing about music, and I don't want to turn into Paul Morley; besides which Gut Acid is one which really speaks for itself, and it's only a few quid so you should probably give it a listen.

Buy it here.

We Roll 100 Deep (2017)

I don't normally bother with downloads for all sorts of reasons far too dull to expand upon, but Peter Hope seemed fairly insistent that I give this one a chance. I don't really know him beyond facebook, but he's always struck me as a man of taste, so I conceded seeing as it was a freebie. I was a bit bemused when the fucker turned out to comprise thirty tracks amounting to over three hours listening, but sod it - I burned the thing onto three separate CDRs and took it out with me on my daily cycle rides in preference to hearing it on the PC whilst sat on my arse. That was about three weeks ago, and this is pretty much the only thing I've listened to in all that time. It's a bit on the long side, but this material really got its hooks into me.

We Roll 100 Deep is a free sampler of tracks issued through New York Haunted, a net label run by a Dutch producer called Drvg Cvltvre and specialising in experimental house and techno, it says here; so yes, I'm a bit out of my depth, although not so much as I thought I would be. We're well and truly into the era of techno as waveforms copied and pasted between different parts of a screen, but thankfully it's still doing what it did when I had a bit more of a clue, and - amazingly for something with three decades of history - still moving forward, still finding new ways to get your back up off the wall, as Kool & the Gang would have it. This stuff isn't quite so minimal as the last time I poked my head around the corner of the door - which was admittedly a while ago - and the first thing which began to sink in as I listened was the sheer diversity of music.

There was a point back in the early nineties when it became obvious that at least a few of those purporting to expand upon the legacy of acid house had actually forgotten how acid house once sounded, and how you might not hear the same beat twice in an hour because the form was still prone to experimentation, crucially avoiding the formulaic; so not everything was strictly four to the floor bass drum and hi-hat bum-tsk-bum-tsk-bum-tsk-bum-tsk. I suspect most of that tendency came from young men with expensive samplers who liked the idea, but er - well, no - I'm not actually going to get out there and dance, I mean it's not really my thing…

Anyway, the repetition of having the same track remade over and over again seems not to be a problem with New York Haunted. About half of these do all sorts of things with beats you might not expect to hear on a piece of music aimed at a club environment. The emphasis is on grooves and atmosphere, the more hypnotic the better, pounding bass and an alien clatter - not much in the way of tune, but then it's not something which seems necessarily missing. Equally, there isn't anything which really just does the same thing for eight or nine minutes. There's an evolution going on in most of these tracks, and the evolution of something which feels so organic that it's difficult to equate it with zeros and ones on a computer screen. If it doesn't always sound like techno as I recall from Villalobos and Shackleton and those guys, it strongly feels like it, even when we have tracks which seem to share DNA with Throbbing Gristle or Nocturnal Emissions or some obscure krautrock act pissing about with a sequencer. Then there's RSS B0YS' Y00R00B 0N which sounds like techno would have sounded had it been born in North Africa rather than North America; and MEZE's obligue Miami bass take on PIL's Religion; and Damaskin's Signal doesn't even have a beat, although I suppose you could sway around to it, and it took me a few listens before I even noticed.

Peculiarly - and I suppose luckily - the hardest track turns out to be pH2's Plastic People, Man, a beast of a beat which could quite easily have been slipped in between Phuture and Mr. Lee without anyone realising; and I was about to thank Peter Hope for the tip and for bringing that particular track into my life when a spot of last minute homework enlightened me to the fact of pH2 actually being himself. I suppose it seems obvious when you think about it.

Three hours of music is probably a bit of an imposition on anyone's time, but not when it's this good - neither a single duff track, nor even really anything which settles for copying something you've already heard. This one feels less like a download and more like a fucking amazing night out.

Get it here.