OH ASTRO - HELLO WORLD (MCD)

New project by Jane Dowe of Mille Plateaux fame. "Tired with the arrhythmic splatter of the countless post-Autechre ProTools Pollocks, motionless Oval acolytes and ear-slicing Schematic Records clones, Jane Dowe jerry-rigged her own software to create music that mirrored the ghostly clicks, piercing pops and quark-sized samples of experimental electronica, but loops all the little blurbs as if she were making pop songs. Hello World¹s plunderful pop is way too Negativland-y for Timberlake to moonwalk on, but it still manages to find curious, intriguing alien melodies created from little more than samples so miniscule that Prefuse 73 would get brain freeze. Dowe - a copyright-infringement vet who donated two jittery tracks to the notorious Deconstructing Beck comp - turns the disembodied monotone of Aesop Rock into a series of fluttering phonemes (congrats to Jane for making Aesop even harder to understand) and turns bits of Missy Elliott and Ennio Morricone (good luck recognizing them) into shimmering chop suey. Add some minimal beat programming, loop the whole mess and you get the sonic equivalent of watching two scrambled pornos projected onto each other and trying to make out the plot. Funky and pretty, Hello World¹s bite-sized samples concoct a weird pop universe that uses ectoplasm from the ghosts of hooks as printer ink for digital pointillism." (CMJ New Music Monthly)