Discography

DISCOGRAPHY

Pardon the appearance while we update this section. Check www.Discogs.com for a more up-to-date list.

[BB001]
Erion - s/t CD
Released 1/1999
The work of one Criterion Thornton, this rather good collection of abstract electronics gets a leg up on the competition by actually daring to engage with the real world. Unlike too many of his contemporaries, Thornton realizes the potential of samplers and drum programming to create stark, vital, politically charged music without resorting to hectoring or self-righteousness.Thus,the excellent "Silencio" - an aglomeration of submarine noises, flamenco percussion and a Linton Kwesi Johnson sample - was inspired by living in a squat in Spain "fighting post-Franco fascism," while the harsh balofonics of "Fingerless" are a reaction to the genocide in Rwanda. Elsewhere, "Urbane is a dub cut-up of a Manning Marable lecture, and "Mejilla" restructures drum n bass as a "Battle Hymn of the Republic" for the digital age.
--The Wire

[BB002]
Meshed-Up Minds - compilation CD
Released 6/1999
It s nice to see when someone promises "extreme electronics"and actually delivers,which is what several tracks on this "Brooklyn meets Minneapolis" compilation do (further truth in advertising: the packaging for this CD-R is actually wire mesh).Though Cartesian Faith s "Shake the Mounting Sensation" sounds like the distorted funk shuffle of Bomb 20 and The Birdwather s "Turn Away (RMX)" could have come straight of Alec Empire s "The Destroyer," "Meshed-Up Minds" mostly manages to eschew Digital Hardcore s stock dark n fuzzy breakbeats, instead experimenting with different percussive textures and grating frequencies. Beats are pitch-shifted up to hyper speed, tinny thuds on Erion s "Reclamation Invocation" and Lost in Translation s "Sexy War," while Timeblind s digital cut-ups on "Stoopid" sound like a rawer Bisk.There are some beatless tracks as well - in fact the middle section of the album crawls along - with the highlights being Radar Threat s "From the Paraphernalia of Oppression," which is a scrum of harsh frequencies spiling up on one another. Impressive, and for listeners wanting a disruptive direction beyond DHR.
--Grooves

[BB003]
Broklyn Truckers Union Local 003 CD
Released 12/1999
Perhaps not as vital as Criterion Thornton's previous, stark but engaged Erion CD, Broklyn Truckers Union Local 003 is endearingly nutty nonetheless. Where Kid 606 doodles all over his NWA and Misfits records with crackles and glitches, here Thornton defaces albums of truck driving songs with titles like Put the Hammer Down, Songs of the Open Road,Big Rigs and the Men That Drive ÔEm with sinister synth whorls and sickly feedback. I know these Duchampian pranks play well in Williamsburg, but what would they think of it below the Mason-Dixon line?
--The Wire

[BB004]
Criterion - Root Canal 12" EP
Released 2/2000
Brooklyn producer shreds the envelope of underground hip hop. Following in the tradition of mystical-dub merchants at WordSound and illbient geniuses Byzar and Timeblind, Brooklyn-based Criterion Thornton expands instrumental hip hop's boundaries on this 12-inch EP. Rather than creating discrete tracks, Criterion composes sidelong pieces that seamlessly coalesce into works of cumulative power. Side 1 starts with distant filtered hand percussion that sounds like horse hooves, then moves into a double-time percus -sive assaults. An edgy, post-industrial menace floats through the mix like a toxic cloud,until near the end of the side a 23 Skidoo-like malarial funk induces a feverish ecstasy. The flip side begins with gritty, oppressive dub a la Scorn and Spectre before it morphs into a stunning collage that teaches an advanced lecture on low-end beat science. Criterion has a slew of releases planned for the rest of 2000, and if Root Canal is indicative of his prowess, he demands your scrutiny
--Alternative Press

[BB005]
Brutal Police Menace CD
Released 11/2000
Brutal Police Menace is New York electronics' declaration of outrage at the callous misuse of power by the NYPD. From Garth Vader's catchy warning to Doily's mockery, we have assembled an album's worth of material which meshes found sounds, spoken word and MCing with the intensity of the city's underground electronic experimentalists.This project is a successful collaboration of artists who play hardcore, hip hop, broken beat, dub and noise, promoting the realization that all of these forms are quickly melding and categorization is futile. What shines through is a collection of tracks that redefine what B.P.M. stands for and how modern home studios can be used to voice dissent. Those present on Brutal Police Menace are Garth Vader, /rupture, Huge Voodoo with Mike Ladd, Criterion, Zipperspy with Christoph Ire, Jack Clang, doily, Aristide Massaccesi, Welmo Romero, Splice, and Ylyptyk. Proceeds from this release will benefit the computer room at ABC No Rio, a Lower East Side community center.
The artists collected on Brutal Police Menace (Broklyn Beats 005) won't stay silent for anyone's sake. This crucial collection is New York's deepest underground beat community's response to the police brutality that has blighted the city in recent years. Compiled by Criterion Thornton, who up to now had seemingly been fighting a one man battle to make electronic music engage with the real world, Brutal Police Menace bristles with excitement, passion, bile, rage, forward motion and energy -- pretty much everything missing from recent electronic music. There's lots of glitchy drum'n bass tangents and sulphuric ragga, but the besttrack is Huge Voodoo's sinister, cinematic collaboration with Mike Ladd,'NYPD Blues.
--The Wire

[BB006]

Criterion - "La Ciudad" live 3"CD-R
Released 11/02
"La Ciudad" is a 20 min. piece commissioned by Tribeca music space Roulette as an emerging artist grant from The Jerome Foundation. "La Ciudad" is a live improvised electronic composition using NYC as the canvas, celebrating the wonder of urbanism. Composed during the Sept. 11 attacks and performed very near Ground Zero the piece offers a Broklyn view of the city.

[BB007]
Broklyn Beats (sic) 7" series

7.0 doily - 2000Dumb
7.1 Criterion - Race Traitor
7.2 DJ/rupture - Rude Descending a Staircase
-released 6/2001
(sic) not because they're sick (although they would definitely have been ill a decade and a half ago and illbient halfway between then and now) but (sic) because Broklyn is not a spelling error. Last year's Brutal Police Menace compilation showed how rife corruption is in NYC. Not least in the police force, which didn't get a sympathetic hearing on the record, but also amongst the beat fraternity. It spliced Gotham grime into fractured hip hop, metropolitan dub and cosmopolitan techno.These 7" form the first instalment of another compilation and follow roughly the same scattershot blueprint, without the law enforcement theme, of stalk-ing the streets in search of a vibe and a sound. Doily drops a dub depth charge down a manhole and then crouches, ear to the sidewalk, waiting for the muffled explosions to rumble back up to her and merge with the city hustle. DJ Rupture takes a more kinetic approach,scavenging frantically through dumpsters covered in extractor fan silt and back-alley disrepair for sounds which he flings out in a torrent of broken beats and then tramples underfoot. Criterion sits somewhere between the two. Still in a part of town you'd rather know less about, still ready to fuck shit up but not with his head down the sewer or stuck inside a dustbin. Race Traitor hammers home an obvious message on the back of a heavily veiled break while Honky Tonk Hits takes the same beat down to a community centre just after the medication has been administered. A piano grinds to a halt as half-a-dozen grizzled old fellas remember how jazz used to sound, slurring "yeah" into their chests and dribbling down their Jets shirts.
--Robots and Electronic Brains, U.K.

7.3
Rotator - Help Me to keep Up Destruction!!!
- released 11/01
France's hidden secret come correct with their first domestic release, a slab of loopy, hard breaks intensi-ty with their signature digital punk attitude. Hailing from Rennes, a city with a rich electronic history, Rotator grow on the French hardcore tradition while taking it deeper into experiments with jungle, punk, dancehall and live MCing. It's time to rumble the French Chicken Floor!!! Check www.peace-off.com.

7.4
Broklyn Beast - The Vampire Strikes Back
- released 6/02
This was a collaboration to document the Broklyn Beats live gigs with DJ Churchshoes. Churchshoes is an excellent scratch DJ who moves from hardcore to rap to whatever suits his needs. Throughout 2002, we (Criterion & doily) played around town with him, tag-teaming while Dr. Shoes scratched and drank. This single represents the beginning of our on-going work with him. It was also a blatant strike at Bush Jr., using the theme of oil-sucking vampire to frame the single. One side is doily with Churchshoes and the other is Criterion with Churchshoes. This single also marked the end of our relationship with Nashville s United Records. We always enjoyed using them given the catalog of country and punk releases made at the plant, but it wasn t until we gave them the image of Dubya with fangs that we found out just how conservative they all were. It was our assumption that we could have won a court battle with them based on 1st Amendment rights, but we didn't feel it was worth the hassle. Thus the homemade sticker and delays...

7.5
One-Speed Bike - I'm a Pretzel on a Stealth Mission to Kill the President
-released 6/02
Aidan is an old buddy from Minneapolis who materialized in this crazy Quebecois band with a huge geek following. Thus, we met him again years later via some blurb in The Wire. His 1-Speed Bike material has developed its own voice with this release and the Broklyn full-length. What more can we say - give the man a beer!

7.6
I-Sound - Sweatin in the Oldies
- released 11/02
Craig Willingham has always been a supporter of Broklyn, playing at record release parties as well as keeping our stuff stocked at the store he manages. it only seemed natural to invite him to do a single. What he's given us is a fine slab of yesteryear rave sounds and contemporary digital sound synthesis. As with his Tranparent imprint, these tracks reflect his quest to bridge his Florida rave and skate days with the present NYC life he lives. He also managed to give us something a bit different from his work on other labels; definitely Broklyn-based, but still all I-Sound. This will also be his last work as I-Sound for awhile as he focuses on Wasteland, his new venture with DJ Scud.

7.7
Donna Summer - PopXplosion
-released 11/02

[BB008]
(SIC) 7" SERIES COMPILATION CD
-released 2/03

"Criterion Thornton and Heather Leitner's Broklyn Beats label has been putting out wonderful, humble little records of homespun distortion and quiet geopolitical rage for several years now. (Sic) (Broklyn Beats BB008 CD), a compilation of their (Sic) series of 7"s, might be their best yet. Like fellow traveller DJ /rupture (who also appears here), Broklyn Beats records have that grainy, heavily distorted sound that suggests an engagement with the real world, symptomatic of the Amercian second wave's major contribution to electronic music: a feeling that electronic music can be an extension of the punk aesthetic and not just studio solipsism and nightclub functionality. Criterion's "Race Traitor" layers a sample of Louis Farrakhan (actually it's Dick Gregory) over a monotone bassline and beats that sound like he's been watching too much TV with aluminum foil on the antenna. Rupture's records have always sounded like the coming Armaggedon time in the Middle East, and here "Rumbo Babylon" and "Descarriada" carpet bomb your ears with daisycutter snares, rapid tics of dancehall chatter, strangulated oud wails and a great snippet of "I'm Waiting for the Man." "March of the Oil Barons" by Broklyn Beast (Criterion, doily and DJ Churchshoes) is as relenteless as it should be, while "The Vampire Strikes Back" imagines the Shrub as the main character in Blackula. Even the not expressly political material sounds great: doily's halting, busted machine dub; Rotator's furious brerakcore; I-Sound's MDMA dementia Old School rave cut-up; Donna Summer's delirious "Popxplosion". "

--Peter Shapiro, The Wire, Issue 230 April 2003

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"Dance music has a long history of warring imagery, drawn from both the us-against-them ethos of the culture and the militaristic moods ingrained in so much machine music. Politics and principles make worthy overlays to a good bit of the backstory, but there's also the lingering reality that, however well-aimed, horror and noise represent aesthetic values as remote as any other. Symbolic or not, there's no mistaking the seizing palpitations at the heart of Broklyn Beats: (Sic), a sample of a New York underground whose frayed nerves dangle in an eerie stillness pitched on the brink of a storm. Drawn from a series of seven-inch singles released by the Broklyn Beats label, the album features a mishmash of searching drum 'n' bass experiments smeared into a Jamaican soundsystem background. Two opening tracks by doily strike an ominous chord, cycling lo-fi industrial moans through ambling basslines and rotten atmospheres. The dank rawness persists through a steady build laced through Race Traitor's blackpower march and the wordly slither of DJ /rupture, whose "Rumbo Babylon" strains a Moroccan-sounding guitar figure through a filter of radio signals and rave reminders. From there, Broklyn Beats dives headlong into madness, marking a high point for a drum 'n' bass scene otherwise devolved into nagging uniformity. Song titles like "March of the Oil Barons" and "Punk Not Dead, Cave Good and Strong" do their literal duty, but the anxious flail of Broklyn Beast, 1-Speed Bike, and I-Sound invoke a bunker mentality more than words ever could. Built around splatter-breaks that don't favor noise at the expense of form, Broklyn Beats takes drum 'n' bass back to its early days of lateral movement and careening rhythm shifts. In that way, the disc offers a draft of revisionist history, but little about Broklyn Beats teeth-gnashing shriek signals anything other than pointed immediacy of a weirdly soothing sort."

--Andy Battaglia, The Onion, Volume 39 Issue 09 13-19 March

[BB009]
Bottleskup Flenkenkenmike - "Looks Like Velvet, Smells Like Pee" CD
released 9/2002
For a lightning jolt, chomp into an electric blanket. It has a fuzzy layer, but when you get down to the core it’s a shocker. The blanket of the moment was hand-woven by Bottleskup Flenkenkenmike aka Aiden , a master of disguise. Mr. Girt is the drummer for Godspeed You Black Emperor, Exhaust, and records solo as One Speed Bike. He has a habit of mashing up percussion into dub chaos. Looks like Velvet, Smells Like Pee is a fine showing of lo-fi, “I don’t give a super fudge what anyone outside my head thinks” gems. Raw, tonal explorations anchored by a trap drum set on fire. Zap.
-frosty, XLR8R Magazine

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You won't be seeing a Bottleskup Flenkenkenmike profile on Livin' Large or any other variation on Lifestyles of the Rich and Vacuous. In fact, the day the guerrilla technomancer shows off his endangered species thongs for Carmen and Kadeem on national television will fall around the time his full-length solo debut takes the nation's Wal-Marts by storm--which is to say, never.
Not that Flenkenkenmike, a.k.a. Aidan Girt, gives a rat's ass about gigabucks or sky-high visibility: He gets plenty of attention playing drums with Godspeed You Black Emperor. Plus, Looks Like Velvet will afford him street cred galore. The inspired rant on the album's closer, "Bronze Medal for Fence Hopping at the Punk Olympics," is the first indication that Girt is far comfier off camera, perhaps wearing a simple black ski-mask/gas-mask combo and holding a pair of wire cutters. "I gotta say this quick, before they change the laws on us," Girt begins, plunging into a scathing indictment of everything from commodity culture to Kylie Minogue before closing with the kind of modest proposal that could very well land him on an FBI list if it weren't all just in good fun.
But Girt's monkey-wrenching m.o. isn't limited to the album's few well-placed bits of political rhetoric. Again and again, he lays waste the rules of techno, building his hypnotic epics around samples from his rock drum kit. On many of Looks Like Velvet's 10 tracks--notably the dubwise finale of "Bronze Medal" and the filter disco masterpiece "Festival Du Jazz Du Maurier Suicide Bombing"--Girt revels in the kind of unabashed maximalism that could make even a density freak like Jeff Mills turn the color of money. Don't be surprised if he doesn't get club play: His fi is too relentlessly lo, his strategies too arcane, and his politics too forthright to capture DJs and crowds accustomed to the high-buck, high-gloss bombast of vapid slicksterizers like Paul Oakenfold and Armand Van Helden. But people will still dance to Flenkenkenmike in campus apartments, tenement squats, and gutsy underground venues like the Dinkytowner, where he performed last October. Looks Like Velvet is that rare album of four-to-the-floor dance tracks that makes for enjoyable listening even while you're sitting down.

--Rod Smith, City Pages VOL 24 #1160, 2/26/03

BB10 - BB14 released 1/04

[BB10]
DOILY "Mattress of the Universe" 12"

[BB11]
Criterion "Wet Pain" 12"

[BB12]
Criterion & doily s/t cd

Three 12"s on one cd! Doily's "Mattress of the Universe" & Criterion's "Wet Pain" & "Root Canal"

CRITERION & DOILY Co-founded by Criterion Thornton and Heather Leitner (a.k.a. doily) in 1999, the Brooklyn based label Broklyn Beats has slowly but surely established itself as one of the most distinctive independent electronic music labels in the world with a series of releases that deliver a dirty mix of broken breakbeats, dubbed our delirium, and plenty of "fight the power" invective. At the same time, it's become a pillar in NYC's experimental electronic scene by providing a platform for local underground musicians such as Donna Summer and I-Sound with it's monthly party Barreled while also playing host to visitors such as Doormouse, Bombardier, DJ Scud, and artists from the French breakcore scene.
"Criterion & doily" combines doily's "Mattress of the Universe" and Criterion's "Wet Pain" 12-inches with and older Criterion 12-inch, 2000's "Root Canal." Doily's contributions are a mix of lo-fi breaks that veer between hip-hop/junglist tempos layered with eerie detuned samples that are dubed-up Jamaican style, falling into the emotional darkness and grit that the Third Eye Foundation achieved on the Ghost album. Criterion travels a similiar but somewhat less grimy rout than his partner, bringing in analog synths that sweep from piercing high-frequency squalls to throbbing bass over filtered dub funk snares on a track like "BB," while "Cold Cold War" is some mutant hybrid of menacing military punk/funk/dub. If these are broken beats then lets hope that Criterion and doily never fix them.
Howard Shih, Grooves Issue 012

[BB13] 1-Speed Bike "El Gallito" 12"[BB14] 1-Speed Bike "El Gallito"
Released 2005

1-SPEED BIKE "El Gallito" is Aidan's third release for the Broklyn Beats label, following his "Looks Like Velvet, Smells Like Pee" album (under the Bottleskup Flenkenkenmike alias) and the "I'm a Pretzel on a Stealth Mission to Kill the President" 7-inch as 1-Speed Bike. Though Aidan is better known to indie rockers as the drummer for the Montreal collective Godspeed You Black Emperor!, the music on his solo release is light years away from the sprawling orchestral skonk rock of that band.
So while the opening track on El Gallito, "There's an Oil Tanker Named Condoleeza Rice," falls squarely in line with the poitical leanings of GBYE and the Broklyn Beats clan, it also displays a twisted sense of humor largely absent from GSYBE's work. The track features what i assume is Aidan's voice reciting phrases like "I am handsome like Donald Rumsfeld," "I got my business in order like Dick Cheney," and "I am the sound of a fart from Barbara Bushes ass at the Easter dinner table" in a deadpan American drawl over funk breaks, while a squall of feedback fades in and out accompanied by dub echoes. The hilarity (or immaturity depending on your political leanings) of the spoken words contrasts so much with the darker nature of the music that it makes for a weird, almost discomforting listening experience. The rest of the A-side is laced with Aidan's humor, courtesy of the wacky guitar/sampled strings accompanying frenetic breakbeats.
The music on the flipside, including a pair of Hrsta remixes, is less harried and sneaks in some somber chords and drones, bringing forth an emotional quality missing from the first side. In all, a quirky, puzzling release that stands out from the current fashions of today's electronica.
-Howard Shih, Grooves Issue 012