Patronage & Pork by Cambo

'Patronage & Pork' is the latest from New York based producer Cam Curran, aka Cambo. Arriving roughly a year and a half after his warped cassette debut for Further Records - where you'll also spot the debut for his Fossil project with SUS collaborator Phil Tortoroli, aka James Place - Cambo offers gritty but urbane electronica full of thumping bass and hypnotic beats across his lengthiest release to date.

Recorded in the guts of a pre-war brownstone while bouncing between jobs, 'Patronage & Pork' is looser and more experimental than the music Curran and Tortoroli release on SUS, but it shares in the kith's characteristic minimalism. If you're familiar with the Tortoroli's James Place recordings though, Cambo should seem like an even more colorful contrast. When 'Patronage & Pork' isn't burning up slowly in restrained psychedelia, it squiggles confidently through heady acid techno with a peppering of more distinctly urban grit thrown in to keep your teeth on edge. Though these tracks are primarily personal experiments, as a collection of songs they contemplate the potentially corrosive forces that gather at the heart of civilization.

"This tape is on point. Samples of self-help gurus, rapped interludes, squealing, squashed synthesizers, peaks and valleys of loud-soft dynamics, martial lock-step of a beat pitch-shifted beyond the point where it could look in the mirror and recognize itself." -Tome to the Weather Machine

"Patronage & Pork finds Curran relying more on fresh beats and devious hooks and less on cerebellum-shattering noise freak-outs than he has previously. The noisy bass of 'Better Husbandry' is tamed by the track's minimal rhythm, and the fried synths found on 'Self-Help' are laid to rest by a dubbed-out groove. 'Typhoid Mary' is club music for noise fanatics, while 'Gunmetal' is experimental hip-hop. Those who have been missing out on Cambo's explosive productions (along with the entire Styles Upon Styles catalogue) are certainly doing themselves no favours; Curran is a force to be reckoned with, a leader in the production of adventurous electronic sounds." -Exclaim

"Lo-fi experimental beats that straddle the line between techno and hip-hop. Refreshingly blown-out, dusty beats with eerie melodies and self-help record samples. Intriguingly detached in a manner somewhat similar to Pursuit Grooves, but this feels like it has more of a distorted noise-scene edge to it. Also kind of reminds me of any late ’90s/early ’00s IDM/hip-hop crossover artists like Push Button Objects, especially during the Nas-sampling closer 'Gunmetal'. 'Typhoid Mary' is the most straightforward 4/4 techno track here, with a dark Randomer 'Bring' kinda vibe that I’m always down for." -The Answer is in the Beat

Tracklist

1.	Better Husbandry	4:29

2.	Supercelestial Thoughts & Subterranean Conduct	5:10

3.	Self-Help	5:13

4.	Uitwaaian	4:13

5.	Typhoid Mary	4:23

6.	Gunmetal	4:37

Credits

released March 17, 2015

License

CC BY-NC 3.0. See the Creative Commons website for details.