Ec8or

The One and Only High and Low (DHR)
by Scott Hefflon

The collaboration of Patric C (E De Cologne, Eradicator) and Gina V. D’Orio (The Sex X Groupies) discovered by Alec Empire (Atari Teenage Riot) and released on Digital Hardcore Recordings. And it sounds it.*
(231 East Fifth St., Ste. A New York, NY 10003)

* OK, to be less flippant for those who’ve never heard DHR-style cyber-grr! – how you missed ATR’s flirtation with popularity a few years back is beyond me – imagine the tunelessness of riot grrl indie rock (the yelping headache that favored “political” girls who couldn’t play, sing, or write songs and their anti-boy sentiments – a movement [so to speak] that I’m very glad occured and is now over with) and electronic music’s belief that a peppy beat and little else constitutes a song – the songwriting process being an excruciatingly slow build-up of percussive elements as performed by a machine.** A typical DHR drum beat is the sound of a drum set thrown down a flight of stairs, sampled, and played too loud through a cheap speaker. If you tried dancing to it, you’d sprain parts of your body you didn’t know you had. If you try to drive to it, well, I don’t recommend it. Ditto with sex. (I mean, I recommend sex, just not having sex to this music. See comment on dancing for details.) If you somehow missed the riot grrl thing (aside from oh, how I envy you!), probably the best analogy would be hearing a catfight that gets all the dogs in the neighborhood howling and knocking over metal garbage cans.

** One final dig… By this point, most drum-oriented electronic music reminds me of David Spade’s joke about limos: In the early days, we were all impressed, now we think “Oooh, you have $80.”