Container
LP [2012]
Release Date: Dec 4, 2012
Genre(s): Electronic, Club/Dance
Record label: Spectrum Spools
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Album Review: LP [2012] by Container
Great, Based on 5 Critics
Based on rating 4.5/5
You can tell just from scanning its sleeve notes that LP promises a continuation of Container's debut. After all, it arrives with the same mischievously anonymous title. Plus, there's the uniformity on a track level. Where its predecessor consisted of five cuts, each one sporting Ballardian nomenclature, seemingly lifted from medical equipment manuals ("Application," "Protrusion," "Dissolve," "Overflow," "Rattler"), so too does the new one: "Dripping," "Paralyzed," "Acclimator," "Perforate" and "Refract." But once you crank this sucker these consistencies quickly crumble.
Based on rating 8/10
Those coming to Ren Schofield’s second album as Container looking for wild variance are missing the point. The project is just the biotech; how it’s suited to different apparatuses is where the project’s intrigue lies. Hence, we get an LP that, like its predecessor, is plainly titled LP and its song titles (“Perforate”, “Dripping”, “Paralyzed”, “Acclimator”, and “Paralyzed”) are clinical and diagnostic, identical in blueprint to the prototype.
Based on rating 7.4/10
Container's Ren Schofield makes techno, but he doesn't make techno like Carl Craig, Richie Hawtin, or Marcel Dettman. Instead, he's one of a growing number of noise and experimental artists to discover that loud, hirsute, pulsing beats are a potent way to disorient listeners. Those beats, mixed with a noisenik's abandon, can unearth sound-worlds trad-y producers miss.
Based on rating 3.5/5
When Kraftwerk released Man Machine in 1978, not only did the band postulate a new environment where repetitive beat patterns were pitched as sonic replications of commercial apparatus, but they also created a model through which machinery was adopted as an instrument for the techno movement they had set in motion. Recorded at their secretive Kling Klang studio in Düsseldorf, the album saw a definitive synthesis in production where the musician was tugged in a direction that allowed for recurrent piston mimicry to become complicit in expressive works that explored the boundaries of ambient recordings, experimental soundscapes, and popular excursions. The equipment that was consequentially brought to the fore of the band’s adopted aesthetic began to change rapidly.
Based on rating 6/10
Since releasing his previous LP, LP, Ren Schofield has moved from Nashville, TN to Providence, RI, but location doesn't seem to have had much of an effect on the music Schofield makes; his latest LP, LP, sounds a great deal like LP. If the carbon-copy title of his new record as Container didn't evoke thoughts about the sounds on his first LP, the music featured here most certainly will. Like its predecessor, LP was recorded completely in mono and is almost identical to his first release, featuring the abrasive, over-compressed drums and brash analog resonances that Container has become synonymous with.