DJ THUMPER! / VANKMEN (Hate State)

So these are two people I've played and toured with a lot in Realicide, but you know there aren't that many tapes I like listening to so I'm gonna write about this one. It's a split c39 tape recorded live from Ravesploitation Fest, November 2007 at The Smell in LA, by Jonathan Snipes (so you know it's alright). It was Thumper's first actual live show, and still the best to date (he doesn't play live very often), featuring gabber and breakcore mixes of the Mortal Kombat theme, Andrew WK, Bush (the band actually) pitted against dialogue from the infamous Virina Tech shooter of 2006, Slipknot and a bunch of other nu metal bands I'm not going to bother trying to name. Basically DJ THUMPER! (aka Mavis Concave, btw) is really fun and well-produced gabber and breakcore fueled by pop culture samples, adding the somewhat subtle mechanics of a rather dark commentary on the entertainment world and how we relate to it as a society. VANKMEN, of Oakland, upholds the title of "best speedcore gabber in North America"... yeah I stand by that statement, and haven't run into much to challenge it so far. Vankmen is fucking brutally hardcore and equally fun, satirizing spaced out kandy ravers to a backdrop of ectoplasm-spattered ghost-busting, in his live set combining hardware drum machines and bent noise gear with segments of Ableton software tracks! This was an incredible festival and this tape documents quite accurately two of the acts that contributed, representing US gabber when so few ever do! Man, breakcore is alright, aside from the gimmicky fart-joke trends, but man, GABBER is what will always keep me going when the going gets rough, and you know it frequently does! Lastly, as this is a Hate State release, it's packaging is hand-knitted, plus the sleeve with Thumper's "lyrics" and Vankmen's shout-outs. When was the last time you came across hardcore techno and hand-knitted tape cases in the same object?! Fucking hell, what a weird thing to exist... DJ THUMPER! www.myspace.com/thumpallnight VANKMEN www.vankmen.com HATE STATE (check out other releases too!) www.hatestate.info ~ Robert Inhuman 09/23/08