Middle of Nowhere [Import, from US]

Having outgrown the happy house of the green and brown albums and exploited narrative too complex for merely ambient techno, the Hartnoll brothers--Phil the elder and Paul the younger--really do find themselves in some vaguely Far Eastern adventure in The Middle of Nowhere. Thus they prove again that they are the most reliable innovators in danceable electronic composition. The inchoate political rage of 1994's Snivilisation is here, but it has found purely instrumental claws that are unafraid to dig for new melodies. "Know Where to Run" gathers itself from some beastly buzzing weather to become a dance-floor creature lurching through the village at night like some urban nightmare and "I Don't Know You People" turns the dance floor into an escapist fantasyland once more with its grousing refrain, "nothing changes--goddamn you!" The highly evolved vocal softness of "Autumn" and the weirdly Tangerine Dream-gone-hip-hop "Style" keep a trip-hop story line seamlessly borne out on jungle and electro beats. Nowhere comprises a portrait of boom-boom techno that carjacks beats once lost in space to whole new worlds where breakthrough songwriting is an aesthetic ideal. The U.K. act who forced the sales charts fully into the postrock '90s is now realizing the participatory promise of rock & roll liberation in the dance clubs, where music lives now. --Dean Kuipers

Middle Of Nowhere, The by ORBITAL

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