DiskCard France 黑胶唱片和CD

Review: French electro house hurl-your-wayers DiskCard are a new, one-off label verging on guerrilla art operation. Their new EP from producer Alich is a cogent musing on the new age of cashlessness and so-called "dematerialisation" (a misleading term, since what we experience as end users of the "cloud" is only the endpoint of an actual huge increase in operating hardware across the board). Even so, it's almost unheard of to hear an EP inspired by the fiscal realities and precarities of the modern world, but here you have it: this 12" electro record doubles up as an (unfortunately unusable) bank card, and themes itself entirely after the anxious state of depersonalised fiscal hyper-convenience we find ourselves in today. The motto is, "for the music that matters, there is DiskCard": and, whether the label mean this explicitly or not, the fetishism of vinyl as a tradeable asset - in the "vault" of every small collector - has telling corollaries with today's largely privatised cashless money system. An ironically slippy verve thus suffuses the EP, with 'Automated Funk Machine' and 'Credit Limit Exceeded' giving banana-split sound design and funhouse electro moods, all informed by the producer's use of small synths and pocket drum devices, and akin to the irreverent ease with which we might part with our money nowadays. Speaking of...