DOUBLER “Lines of Force” (U-Udios)

On U-Udios Three, Doubler becomes sentient. Our heroes, Jason Letkiewicz and Mike Petillo, enter into their laptops and electronic gear at the atomic level, communing with the wires and nodes and chips and drives, finally ejecting a sonic blueprint called “Lines of Force” that will hopefully pave the way for scientific breakthrough. See, Doubler squirts beyond friction, beyond combustion, and shoots like a plastic capsule through some kind of futuristic pneumatic tube, generating awe and wonder and probably just a little bit of jealousy from every non-future person they happen to come across, like farmers or whalers. Or they’re what plays over the loudspeaker at spaceports – it’s all a blur right now, I don’t know.

“Lines of Force” is both twisty and smooth, a kind of playground for your kids who’ve had too much juice, or whose juice has been spiked with too much Dimetapp. It exists in dreamworlds and race tracks, on motorbikes and in isolation chambers. It’s both chill and vibrant at once, and it fills up your mind with weird visions of the future, kind of like the ones that are spilling out of my mind and into this review right now. But that’s the kind of thing you have to allow for, the unusual, unruly response to hits of adrenaline and dopamine. We like to feel good, and Doubler doubles, triples, and quadruples down on the magic goo, slime coating ears and solidifying into a characteristic assimilatable via evolution to the human condition. How’s that for future mind slop!

https://u-udios.bandcamp.com/

--Ryan

GEO RIP “U-Udios Two” (U-Udios)

For U-Udios’s second release, the label didn’t have to look much farther beyond their first release – by Protect-U – to find a worthy successor. Indeed, Protect-U’s (and U-Udios’s) Aaron Leitko and Mike Petillo join Dope Body/Nerftoss’s John Jones as Geo Rip, a sewer-surfing threesome catching shit waves of mangled electronics and vertigo-inducing rhythms. These disco scuzz rats will most undoubtedly get your rump shaking, albeit right after dosing your beer with LSD.

It’s hard not to nod your head along to Geo Rip’s “mulched samples,” as the whole thing was captured live as manipulated, so everybody was in the same room getting into the same groove. Huffing the same fumes. Getting heady at all times. “U-Udios Two” matches that carefree headspace, that loose vibe where mental relaxation meets improvisational gymnastics, resulting in a wriggling, slurping, slime-coated manifesto of cartoon booty-moving. Each note and programmed hit feels like a fudge-smeared dueling-glove slap to the face, and your only recourse is to swerve your scooter into a ditch and emerge ready for a dance-off.

That’s the Geo Rip way.

But let’s be clear: fun is guaranteed, and a good attitude is a prerequisite. You’re just going to be rolling around in the slop for a while, the ooze, the nastiness – which is just how Geo Rip wants it. You’re just joining them down there anyway.

https://u-udios.bandcamp.com/

--Ryan

PROTECT-U “U-Udios One” (U-Udios)

We’re not gonna start rummaging through my hard drive, that much I’ll tell you right off the bat. We’d find some half-finished ideas from years ago – MAYBE. Most likely we’d unearth some incompetent jamming or covers of terrible songs. It would really just be incredibly awkward for all involved, but mostly it would be an uncomfortable journey into my inept past. I don’t think I could take getting crushed by that type of embarrassment again.

For Aaron Leitko and Mike Petillo, aka Protect-U, also proprietors of fine items at U-Udios, scrubbing the underside of every file folder in their hard drive was a much more rewarding experience. “U-Udios One” collects the unreleased material gleaned from this exercise, the product of two and a half years of work following Protect-U’s debut “Free USA.” It’s … it’s way cooler than anything that’s ever been on my computer, I gotta admit. Even if these tracks were cobbled together for the sole purpose of allowing them to see the light of day, there’s a coherence of composition here that presents a unified listening experience.

Sparse electronics verge on breaking through to techno at times, but mostly they skitter and squirm in lo-fi burrows, emerging from the murk periodically to see what’s going on outside. Often Protect-U latches onto a mood and hovers there, exploring in detail the alcoves and crevasses of their position, fiddling with pieces and fragments until they stretch into fully formed passages. The exploration, the experience, is the key, and each track is the tactile result of audio excavation. Hard not to get excited about something like that.

Now, if only I had something good to put on a tape…

https://u-udios.bandcamp.com/

--Ryan