3 min read

Meet Me By the Panamax Barricades

New Polinski 12" vinyl - Meet Me By the Panamax Barricades, in a cool Data Airlines sleeve that looks like a floppy disc

A N N O U N C I N G . . . ///

Hiya. This week, I am very happy to be finally telling you about MEET ME BY THE PANAMAX BARRICADES, the new mini-album from Polinski. Or is it a fully fledged album? Or an e.p? It can be whatever you want it to be, as long as what you want is half an hour of bangers straight from the beating heart of MIDI City.

Meet Me By the Panamax Barricades is a comrade/sibling/life-companion to last year's Telex From MIDI City. It offers another glimpse into that mysterious, utopian place through the medium of kick drums, synthesiser melodrama, and a generous amount of reverb.

It will be available on Friday 5th April on heavyweight 12 inch vinyl from Data Airlines as well as digital for all the MP3 purists out there. The vinyl comes in this delicious, custom Data Airlines floppy disc sleeve, like so:

HERE IS A TRACK-BY-TRACK ANALYSIS

01. THE MATTE FLEX (03:40)

Northern SYSEX data and drum breaks chopped to oblivion. Melodies pressed thick and tight like recycled plastics. Analog uncertainty.

02. THE SATURN TAPE (RUPTURE MIX V2) (03:23)

Live from the Panamax Barricades! This one really captures that shipping container zeitgiest they've been talking about over at Live Centraal. A haze of dry ice and wet heat. If only the world of this song had more than one entrance… Guess the unlicensed sample! Answers on a telex. (Don't worry, she can afford to forego the royalties.)

03. FRACTAL CLUB, LET'S GO! (03:08)

From here you can barely see the coast, but somehow you can still hear it. It's raining subsonics. Don't let the cheesy nintendo triumphalism fool you, this song is deadly serious. An assemblage of oceans. Brings new meaning to the idea of 'wavetables'.

04. IDEA#3_PANAMAX.WAV (04:49)

Down at the barricades, a crash barrier zoetrope spitting out sun bolts of dancing light. The slats in the barrier are born of rust and salt water fortitude. It’s the sounds of all the paths untaken getting combined with the sounds of the one you did. More unlicensed samples! The hidden desperation of pop songs carved out and scattered like jewels on sand as the tide comes in. Glimmer-sifted breakbeats, notes half-buried like ammonites. Ammonotes?

05. FM DIPLOMACY (05:15)

Choose Your Own Adventure Polymeter. A disintegration of discrete events. A fountain of sawtooth waves tumbling out of a sonic rift and collapsing into a frothy kind of turbulence understood only as a quantised verison of itself. A loose constellation of preconceptions vaporising. A glimpse of unstructured ways of being. Also kick drums!

06. NOSTALGIA LAKE IS DYING, PT 1 & 2 (10:15)

Industry standard beats flowing like a delta, tangled like seaweed. What is this beat's disposition? How strong its riptide? How scared/scarred its heart? There's a brittle confidence in the snares, a bodily warmth in the fullness of its kick drums. Restless hi hats like a thousand tiny telegrams of uncertainty. Arpeggios rise like flowers reaching for the sun. A featureless mass of soil rises slowly from the water.


Hope that clears things up. The video for The Matte Flex will be arriving next Friday and it features some typically understated glitchy computer art. Here's a sneak peek:

a glitchy polinski operating system doing its weird glitchy thing.

Telex From MIDI City lore completists (there's got to be at least one of you out there, right??), get your notebooks ready.