Yup, now I'm writing about breakcore...

Way off the beaten track for me, but kind of fun, this first full-length from the Detroit electro- type Todd Osborne. I asked for it because Ghostly does Skeletons and the Kings of Cities. It's very different from that, different enough that I am probably only marginally qualified to write about it. (Or, to put it more pointedly, unqualified.) Anyway, the review's from PopMatters, earlier in the week.

Osborne
Osborne
(Ghostly/Spectral Sound)
US release date: 13 May 2008
UK release date: 26 May 2008
by Jennifer Kelly

Big beats and slick surfaces.


"It's all outlined in my head," says DJ Todd Osborn (the "e" is only in his stage name), as "Our Definition of a Breakbeat", his process-unveiling collaboration with Ed DMX, gets into gear. "As long as I don't have an aneurysm, this song is going off without a hitch," he adds, then repeats, until it briefly becomes part of the song. It's an unlikely vocal hook, even juxtaposed against insistent handclaps, synthetic bass, and shouts. Still, it gets at the weird mix of physical and mental energy in Osborne, a wholly enjoyable though somewhat discontinuous trip through house styles of the 1980s.

Osborn is a Detroit-area electronic artist who also records under the name Soundmurderer. This is his first full-length, following the Ruling EP, which contains identical versions of four of these songs, and a handful of singles. He originally meant to call the record Multitasking, a reference not just to the album's one-guy-with-a-computer work ethic, but also the multiplicity of ideas shoe-horned between its covers. You could hardly find a more soul-slick, synthesized groove than "Ruling" or a spikier, drum-heavier percussive rant than "Afrika". It's hard to believe they come from the same guy.

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MySpace streams are all I can find.