Yip-Yip

I’m first to admit that my favourite aesthetic aspect of punk is how anyone can be a part of it. Without training, all you have to do is pick up an instrument and start wailing, just as long as you’ve got a sense of rhythm. Well, since punk’s played itself out, software is becoming the new instrument of the layman. Anyone can pick up a demo copy of any number of digital sequencing programs and cut a collection of crappy little tracks. Even better, with e-mail making it much easier to contact record labels and distributors, it’s that much easier to score a label deal with your DIY electronic demo. This trend’s become a selling point for a lot of new artists, and Yip-Yip are yet another. In the Reptile House is their first widely distributed LP, following a slew of self releases going all the way back to 2001, and I’m not hyperbolising when I say their website is more interesting to me than their music. It seems almost as if Yip-Yip simply sound enough like the abstract electronica that dominates the after hours circuit. They incorporate enough kitschy whirring sounds and tempo shifts to be just perfect for label reps to try a hand at convincing people to drop money on what they’d have you believe is the emergence of the bedroom cyber-punk movement — to borrow an oft-misused term. Each directionless