BROOKS (Accidental Records - UK) in the Five Hour Challenge
Author: Hardware
Monday, October 4, 2004
Support: Weird Gear resident - Boogs
First garnering attention for the swollen nocturnal beats and bleeps of his acclaimed 2002 debut, You Me & Us, as well as sets at seminal Manchester club night Electric Chair, Andy Brooks has beaten path through dance music that could only be described as singular.
Within two weeks of his debut release, Brooks (then age 19) was flooded with offers remix work to the stars - Outkast, Scissor Sisters, The Human League - and a seemingly endless stream of choice DJ slots around Europe. It was these sojourns to the further flung reaches of the old continent that began to shape the quantum leap in imagination towards the follow-up album, the new, very necessary and very twisted Red Tape.
The unhinged rage and euphoria of a carnal, truly bohemian European underground unleashed Brooks from the conservative confines of corporate British club culture. Andy began penning notes for the album after a DJing trip to Berlin at the Panorama Bar. "Someone there told me that the week before a man in the club climbed up on the roof and was so fucked that he opened up one of the skylights and pissed all over the dancefloor. Just amazing."
Red Tape is a personal journey for Brooks. Embracing everything from The Weimar cabaret effect; Lord Byron's dirty escapades in a villa with narcotics; the dark-room sex of modern Berlin's rapturous night-time culture; the howling winds of graveyards in Edinburgh at 3am; the music of industrial machinery - Red Tape is a last stand in honour of the party, oozing glorious, twisted, sinful menace.
Tracks such as the explosively dark jam Do The Math and the homoerotic re-tread of Polly Harvey's Mansize merely hint at the multi-layered diversity of the album.
It is no coincidence that Brooks is latest signee to Matthew Herbert's Accidental label. The controlled chaos that earmarks the label is writ large through Red Tape.
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