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Igloomag.com REVIEW ::

Pietro Da Sacco | 12/20/2005

(4 out of 5 stars)

"REVIEW BY: Mark Teppo at [...]

(02.21.05) Soaring ambient opening notwithstanding, Bidnezz hiccups and stutters like it is the performance art piece for the Dance of the Misfit Toys. With twenty-two tracks that take anywhere from less than thirty seconds to more than five minutes to present their broken toy choreography, Bidnezz hums with the chaotic spasms of fractured hip-hop. Imagine Dr. Dre bringing in Oval to do final tweaking of the latest West Coast blunt tracks.



Vibraphone and drum kit perform a loungesque soft shoe in "Wallis & Futuna (remix of Steve & Rob)" while digital processes slice and drop the duet into a hiccuping instrumental. The gentle mood of "Dog Actually (remix of Mic Mell)" is shattered by a rupturing of sonic walls, a breakthrough that allows surges of scrambled vinyl noises to fill the room. The vocal line of "Hollis (remix of Cinelux)" is heavily sliced, the simple lyrics turned into stuttering gasps of broken words. "Disa Bling" hops and churns around a sliver of voice, a cut-up sample that is folded back on itself a few hundred times until it becomes barely recognizable as having been born from an organic source. "$$legs" is an R & B piano melody that is caught in a static snare and, as it struggles to break free, it distorts and breaks up, becoming a fragmentary ghost of its full-bodied self.



Some of the interstitial pieces -- the short bursts of sound that live and die in less than a minute -- are transitional efforts, burps of scattered collages in "Babbling" and "Worldcomin" that erupt like a fast-forward moment on an old tape deck. Others like "Hipsteos" cross your radar like moments of clarity on the radio dial where you interrupt some strange Caribbean transmission already in progress. As individual tracks, they don't last long enough to sustain any life of their own but, when taken in tandem with their adjacent tracks, these small transitional pieces add to the overall texture of Bidnezz: the strange and fragmentary soundtrack for a kingdom of damaged wind-up toys. Travis Stewart makes songs and then cracks them open, curious as to their internal workings. The resulting pieces are patchwork creations with gaps and holes in the integrity of their melodies, leaving room for the exposed tick-tock of their clockwork mechanisms."