Pitchfork

You're sick of it, I'm sick of it, but ignore it as you might, electroclash aix92t going back into that closet doubling as a fifth floor walk-up any time soon. It's on the floor to stay, neither muffling its cheap-sex grunts nor apologizing for its shitty haircuts, shredded thrift store shirts, $200 pants, spiked wristbands, and trucker caps. Funny thing is, with all the trawling for irrelevant and/or relished treasures, this little crossbred genre that's finally come home to roost has been giving dissidents reason to pull up some other lost music not made by coke-loving third rate models. In what may be the only outpost of French love for the US at the moment (and vice-versa), Tigersushi not only functions as a website that namechecks the lost downtown groups, delves into fringe Village figures, weird hip-hop, the funkiest of Krautrockers and all the latest remixers but as a label, mashes genres into a great, rubbery wad. Taking all that knowledge down to the stoops and out on their rooftops, they dropped some serious pidgin shit in 5 EPs, jumbling old and new together in an electro tongue that's both an exclamation and a groan: \x93More Goddamned Music?!\x94

Famous for her opening turn on Andrew Weatherall's Nine O'Clock Drop-- one of the first comps to poke at the abandoned bum of "left-field disco"-- eurotrash warbler Gina X is in the lead-off slot again, taking a detached drum kick and Vicki the Robot vocals to offer up tribute to an English gentleman, with an attitude that resonates twenty years on, snotty and clear. The Bush Tetras' detuned tom thud of \x93Things That Go Boom in the Night\x94 gets further reduced by Alice Machine into reverberating finger snaps, loin-quivering low tones, and coy femme coos about being on the night-prowl.

It wouldx92t be French without some of their own bizarre contributions to the world of trashy fashion recordings tacked on, no matter how plastic. Going as far back as 1978 to document a bastard child of Gainsbourg's \x93Requiem Por Un Cox94 clopping on Superfly's lost roto-toms, a froggy Max Berlin gulps through ripples of melodica and synth wave into some illegitimate disco for \x93Elle et Moi\x94 that is quelle bizarre. Even in the shallow end of Ya-Ya girl babble in \x93Swinging Pool\x94, an homage to the Club Palace, it feels relatively deep today.

Old and new get confused, which is easier to preach than practice. The alien-abducted graffito of Chapter Three (which convenes somewhere between Sun Ra, Special Request, and Sugarhill Gang) brings the fresh-dork fusion of \x93Smurf Trek\x94, while Jamalski, beamed from the dying planet of BDP, gets to toast on top of \x93Extraterrestrial Manoeuvers in the Dark\x94, and it's as if time has slipped together. Acts like Metro Area retain their rain-slicked cool clacks and snapping clomps for \x93We Also Not\x94, even standing next to mid-nineties Detroit producer Terrence Parker, while relative newcomer Maurice Fulton leaves Stevie Wonder's floaties in Tri Repetae's pool.

Least interesting is Silver Apples' one-trick pony, an oscillator perfect-pitched onto a banjo in the desktop recycle bin. Simeox92s track makes him out as a Charlie Kaufman-type, cantankerously babbling to his girlfriend about salad for four minutes. On the other hand, Tigersushi does present the first swatch of Bill Laswell's Material that doesx92t make me nauseous-- in fact this hot shit track has me rethinking my whole take on the man. That they glean Cluster's creamy \x93Hollywood\x94 for the finale-- so epic in its electro splendor-- auguring G-ride frequencies on a \x93Flight of the Valkyries\x94 type of trip is leaving the goddamned best for last.