Smash Blips by Cell\Borg

In the mid-70s, Michael Rother of Neu! and Harmonia would sit by the German river Weser and watch the water flow by. The flow of the river contributed to the rhythm known as “Motorik”, a stately European pulse. Perhaps the Weser continued its journey across continents and oceans, enveloping primordial British DIY electronics and found its way snaking up through the Hudson, past Brooklyn, towards the Great Lakes and the Midwest, down the Cuyahoga in Ohio and somehow finding its way to Los Angeles. If one can imagine the motorik sound surging through the proto-punk American underground of the mid-70s via cassette tapes and ma bell trunk lines you can imagine what art-damaged outsiders armed with ring modulators, primal drum machines and pop sensibilities might have done with it. Nearly 50 years later a potential result is clear. The sound might be crisper, now traveling trans-am fiber-optic cables, from B\CELL in Brooklyn to J\CELL and M\BORG in Los Angeles, but the aesthetic remains. Appropriately released on cassette and digital download first, now we can finally hear the results on the cutting edge of 1970s audio formats, the vinyl Long Play. - Dan Selzer, Acute Records/New York Endless