Chop

As the head of Ape Studios (a noted wellspring of vintage synths, guitars and assorted gear), Coz Littler has at his disposal the funkiest brushes with which to paint the silence. His compositions as Chop (formerly Mr. Chop) have done just that, bridging the gap between future funk stylings, which are at once psychedelic, cinematic, jazzy and laden with vocoder, and experimental realms such as kosmische and musique concrète. His latest full-length, Illuminate, is his most fully realized effort by far. Heavy drums stir the soul beneath waves of analog synths, alien distortion and fragmented chunks of vocoder as Chop twists an EMS VCS3 with a TKS sequencer beyond the imaginations of their late '60s creators. This album is less indebted to the original library music and funk classics, and more in line with contemporary, albeit crate-digging, indie electronic acts like Black Moth Super Rainbow, Chrome Canyon and Shawn Lee. Illuminate looks forward at what can be, rather than being a researched approximation of what was.