Beat

Bowery Electric: Lawrence Chandler (vocals, guitar, keyboards, programming); Martha Schwendener (vocals, keyboards, bass).
Additional personnel: Wayne Magruder (drums).
Recorded at Studio 45, Hartford, Connecticutt.
New York's Bowery Electric was among the first six-string-slinging crews to pick up on the daring dance cues left by My Bloody Valentine's "Soon" and by Seefeel's QUIQUE. Finding themselves without a full-time drummer, Electricians Lawrence Chandler and Martha Schwendener supplemented their overcast guitar drone, lazy-lidded vocals, and plangent basslines with beat loops scavenged from scratchy hip-hop records. BEAT presents an appealingly static hybrid sound, with the rhythm track locked in a slow skulk, the mass-effected instruments bellowing low-radiation feedback at near-ambient levels, and the voices intoning somewhere in between.
On "Empty Words," "Coming Down," and "Black Light," pro tem trapsman Wayne Magruder steps in with an impressive real-time simulation of the trebly and circular sampler-spun rhythms. Flying solo on tracks like "Looped," "Under the Sun," and "Postscript," Chandler and Schwendener follow the formula of drowning, droning, ice-blue deluge-of-sound swells and bass trawl that defined Bowery Electric's eponymous 1995 debut. But they're keenly aware that BEAT has a foot in new terrain. The rhythmic revelations of the title track, "Without Stopping," and especially the superb "Fear of Flying" are too exciting to ignore, casting the die for further exploration of beat-based possibilities--including 1997's BEAT remixes, VERTIGO.