s w e e t b e a t s
september.26.2000 - #274
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artist : CinΘrex
album : Exit All Areas (Part 2)
year : 1998
label : Spoonin
genre : Lo-Fi
catalogue : 0521482
quality : CD 192k HQ True Stereo
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01 First Impressions 2:43
02 Feminax 3:36
03 My Name Is 2:50
04 This Is For You 4:15
05 Horace Silver 4:07
06 I Spy 4:00
07 Vibe 4:49
08 Tumbleweed 4:32
09 The Day I Lost My Shadow 1:52
10 Blow Tenderly 4:21
11 Pilo Epilogue 3:14
12 Flight 001 13:13
12 tracks | 00h 53m 32s | 73MB
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Eclectic project that dances 'round the edges of techno & pop,
groove & lounge.
The roots of CinΘrex can be traced to 1994, when Kelvin Smits
(club-DJ who released some stuff in the early nineties as Kelvin,
Astrospider, Nuts on Mars ...) and Tom Barman (singer of the group
dEUS) started a cooperation called General Electrique. The result
of these two different musical currents was a bunch of demo-tapes
with a hypnotizing mixture on it. Although the project raised quite
a few expectations, there was no release on CD due to problems with
the record firm of dEUS. Although Island had an "option" on the
group, it decided not to release anything.
Meanwhile, Kelvin started searching for like-minded people in the
Belgian underground techno-scene. He found these in Sebastien
Kalinji, aka DJ Bobo - one of the founders of the label Wonka
Recors - and in Tomy Rombouts - who had some success with the
techno-project Digital Excitation but evolved later to a "post-post
modernist soundscaper"). With two ladies, Ivy Smits (previously in
bands such as Mind The Gap & Fever) and the American Alissa Kueker
(ex-Skylab 2000, Bassland ...) the group CinΘrex (after a famous
movie building in Antwerp) was founded. On occasion, Kelvin also
involved his uncle, George Smits - the now defunct musician from
the group of skiffle-animal Ferre Grignard, in the experiments.
The group started recording immediately (from 1995 to 1997), yet
their debut release would only appear in the stores in June 1998.
This was because insurmountable troubles arose with the "clearance"
of a number of samples on which they built their songs. After a
series of endless negotiations with the owners, they ended up
dropping all the samples." Sebastien : "If we had paid all the
samples we wanted, we would've had to pay to get the record in the
stores. With the members of die Anarchistische Abendunterhaltung we
came up with similar melodies that they recorded for us. This whole
detour cost us a few years, but ended up being a an enrichment for
our music. It was a change of course under gunpoint, but for the
better". Because the songs of General Electrique that were still
lying around fitted quite good within the songs of CinΘrex, two of
these (Feminax and Blow Tenderly) have finally found their way to
CD-land.
"Exit All Areas part 2" (Part 1 was never issued due to these
sample-problems) became a record "on which boundaries fade",
according to Christophe Verbiest in De Morgen : "<First
impressions> sounds a bit like Tricky, <This is for you> floats on
a sultry groove, on <Vibe> sluggish beats mingle with free-floating
ambient. <My name is ...> stands for jazz meets electronics, <The
day I lost my shadow> is quiet folkblues, and <Flight 001> leans
towards Esquivel-ish lounge-pop. In short : this is a very varied
album, that doesn't leave a crumbled impression." Jacky Huys of
Knack was another fan : "This is a more than pleasant surprise ...
a compelling and surprising trip along deformed vocals, jazz-piano,
funky bass, drum'n'bass, dance, dEUS (Tom Barman sings "Feminax")
and lounge music α la Air. Definitely good."
Live, the group tours as "CinΘrex Sound System", a changing group
of DJ's. Kelvin : "It's isn't our attention that people come to see
us, they have to party. We never have pretended to be a live-band.
We have tried that in our techno- and house-past, but there always
that one machine that fails on stage and you end up looking like a
fool."
The future: "We have a number of songs in preparation already, but
there's still a lot of work to be done. We want the next CD to be a
lot better, and we don't want to repeat ourselves.".
Members :
- Kelvin Smits
- Sebastien Kalonji (aka Bobo)
- Tomy Rombouts
- Ivy Smits (aka Zoumbal Ley, eh ... Zulma Bay)
- Alissa Kueker
--houbi.simplenet.com
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