::CLICK HERE to visit Yoko Solo at Quake Trap
::CLICK HERE to buy songs from Yoko Solo's The Beeps at iTunes
::CLICK HERE to visit Yoko Solo at PCSC and download his free EP THE FROTH
::CLICK HERE to visit Resynthesize at IVDT where a new Yoko Solo remix is.
Yoko Solo has rocked, flopped, pony-shared and fizzle-schizzered super rock KoncertZ with such buffoons and heroes as Daedelus, Boom Bip, Jel, Telephone Jim Jesus, edIT, DJ Assault, Macromantics, Xololanxinxo, bloodysnowman, Dopestyle, Copy, Panther, Daddy Kev, Odd Nosdam, Pu22l3, Mike Boo, Glitch Mob, Eustachian, Bigga Bush, MachineDrum, Dj Olive, Count Bass D, Katastrophe, FatHed, Tussle, The Bastard Prince, Mochipet, Mophono, Run_Return, DJ Funk, Safety Scissors, G.Rizo & Chachi Jones.
He's just so inKredibUL/rad. Damn. I can't believe it, shoot.
::..:::.....:..::....:::::..:::..:::::::......:::...::.:::.. ..::::..::"Aldous Huxley sussed acid as a filter-smasher, knocking out the brains utile tractor beam and letting the world flood in. We have the aural equivalent here. Brandon LaSan chucks everything at the laptop wall and it congeals into one massive Day-Glo bright funky mess. Breakbeat, hip hop, techno, acid, electro-collage, disco and well, like I said, just everything. Of the fourteen tracks on offer, each one of those spins into several plateaus within themselves only to dart back to reassert themselves and then off again. But it is a coherent avalanche, danceable, listen-able, and really just resembling a rapid fire DJ mix. You need to pick this up, drop it on your iPod or whatever, and jump around town looking like a total lunaticits the only way to spread the word, brothers and sisters..."
John Fletcher, Gridface
"Spaced out, wacky, alien, out of context, densely populated, digressive, transgressive, industrial, noisy, manzai, double-talking, vibrant, eccentric, bursting with energy, shamelessly outgoing and as delicious as octopus dumplings. The Beeps is by turns a giddy, dysphasic, sample-chewing curveball of jumble rhythms, freak beats, terminal breaks, cyber-flashes, mutant jazz and downtempo sleaze. Its like negotiating a minefield of helium balloons at the end of gravitys rainbow. Or something equally ridiculous. Fans of Four Tet, Squarepusher, Aphex Twin, Fridge, Boom Bip, perhaps even the wilfully perverse monster rap outfit, Clouddead will delight in its fractal magic, but your average clubheadz wont know what the f**k is going on. There are not even any ballads."
Alan Sargeants, Crud Magazine
"Ambient electronic music with ideas in it is pretty damned rare, so when not-actually-Japanese-person Yoko Solo gets it going, The Beeps is pretty exciting. I mean, you'd expect that, what with song titles like Don't Fall Asleep I'm Warning You Don't Fall Asleep and Covered in Feces... Stronger Than You, Rotten. Dude likes to inspire aural whiplash, like when the ticky-ticky beats on Partial Collapse / Useless Control Systems (I've Got No Rights) turn into metal monster drums, or when the freaky voices on Nowave melt into whatever the hell that boinging noise is. This record will give you a juicy headache and perhaps get your mind laid."
Matt Cibula, Insound/PopMatters
"The Beeps mates wikky wikky turntablism with various off-beat skitters, shuffles, wailing squelches and tasteful breaks to keep your head in the game. An experimental challenge worth taking on."
Jen Boyles, URB
"If you listen closely to The Beeps, you will hear an album influenced by hip-hop, dance, and funk. In order to hear these influences, you must break through Yoko Solo’s wall of experimental noise that can be best described as absolutely bizarre... This is not the kind of music you play when you need to unwind because the tracks on The Beeps sound like old school video game tracks performed by some dude on meth."
TonyDoug Wright, Erasing Clouds
"Neither of electro-experimentalist Solo's CDs - the cinematic The Forbidden Channel, the ugly Weese EP - prep you for the busted, bumping savagery of nancing-but-skull-fucking tech-heavy tunes like The Alarm. Yet, there's beauty to be found in the edgy elegance and silvery waves..."
A.D. Amorosi, CHORD
"Yoko Solo operates with the same basic tools as Four Tet (laptop, drum machines, samples, found sounds, etc...), and achieves the same sort of exuberant chaos as Everything Ecstatic, but does so in such a gleefully filthy manner as to make Four Tet's flawless genre mashings look like the work of an OCD nut. Yoko Solo's duct tape and scissors collage approach to electronic dance music proves to be a refreshing take on the genre...as close as electronic music has ever come to sounding the way punk must have sounded in the '70s."
Philip Stone, Splendid Magazine
"Solo harnesses old-school hip-hop's boom-bap sway to groaning synthesizers in order to fashion uneasy funk...from 8-bit tomfoolery to headbanging jungle, in fact, he yokes it all together, and, with a crack of the snare, it's off and rumbling."
Phillip Sherburne, Earplug
"With 14 tracks squeezed into 45 minutes, LaSan understands the value of short, fully completed compositions yet without resorting to frenzied caffeinated thrashy juvenilia. On the other hand, LaSan has a film composers understanding of pacing, as there is definitely a light-to-dark-and-back arc to the album. Early cuts like Kluge (?!) and Pigbucket Blam Blam lay out some noir motifs as they shift between techno stutters and DJ Shadow syncopated backbeats on the former and Mark Stewart and the Maffia razor guitar and big beat on the latter. The mood gets grimier and more menacing on the Infinite Collapse triology of psychodramas that fall somewhere between Kool Keith sci-fi madness, Edans psychedelic trips, and Sensationals narcotic nightmares. Krak looks back to the polyrhythmic tribal grooves of 23 Skidoo, while No Party, Wind/Vomit is blunted No-U-Turn jungle/guitar distortion."
Richard Moule, Grooves
"In my opinion there are really only two ways to listen to this album.
(1) Alone on a loooong car ride (long as you may want to listen twice).
(2) Alone in a dimly lit room with good headphones.
The Beeps is quite a sophisticated album. The organization of beats and their paring with melodies is very unusual and like I said earlier, dark... If y'all need a base comparison, I would say that Yoko Solo's, The Beeps is a lot like Dosh's, Pure Trash, where both are heartfelt and hauntingly melodic. Only Yoko Solo is slightly more demented. Only slightly... only slightly."
ADD-MMM, Imageyenation
"Mixing funk, electronica, and pure noise, Solo has delivered a record worthy of a psychedelic acid trip. The Beeps is truly a record that plays with the concepts of music and genre as Solo bends the rules, all the while delivering an experience unlike any other."
Jonahs Schwartz, Junk Magazine
"The Beeps is like an early electronic album, a return to the source, which positions it next to the works of Daft Punk (the "Rollin' & Scratchin'" era), Orbital and Aphex Twin with a light dose of industrial in the Front 242 vein. ...I wouldn't play it at a cocktail party, but if you think of music as some kind of abstract art, this CD is for you."
Ed Dantes, Plume Noir
"Very few people can take their love of experimental music to a level of accessibility, most will refuse to do so at the point of entry. But this album takes on the challenge by creating a sound scape that comes off aggressive on one end, very danceable in another, with a lot of different production techniques tried out in each track. What I enjoyed about this is that each song did not sound like what came before, and yet the thread of continuity is something that develops as the album goes along. In other words, the first listen may seem a bit confusing and overwhelming, but the flow is gradual and one that is very satisfying once you're locked into the grooves."
da bookman, Music for America
"Beats drive everything in Yoko Solo's world, whether they are break-beat, hip-hop, dirty drum 'n' bass or the sludge which percolates through the sub-basements of old school buildings during the winter months. LaSan's got an inventive mind and he leaps without prevarication from style to style, bouncing off all manner of sounds and textures."
Mat Propek, Igloo Magazine
"Some of the best stabs at electronica are those that deliberately aim for the cracks between styles. Yoko Solo aka Brandon LaSan graduated into this world after putting in time as an electronic DJ on Osaka radio; his absorption of a multitude of house, hip-hop, and other experimental electronic regions brought forth a very dyamic approach to sound as shown over his early EP's. Rarely does The Beeps sit as background music, at all times it usually is amassing jumbled clusters of casios, broken beats, bent keyboard chords that almost never settle into a groove, yet there is a definite structure going on. It's hardly the blazing in-your-face attack of say, Donna Summer/Jason Forrest, but there's a continual swirling of patterns and continual weird shapes flying about that might not be the most recreational listening for an entire album, but issues some really challenging and interesting sound that sounds especially vibrant in the course of a radio set, or in shuffle mode on the Ipod. LaSan has definitely come up with a cool vocabulary with basic means, it should be very interesting to see where it evolves."
Brian Turner, WFMU
"The album begins with the powerful Kluge (?!) - all mangled electronics set to bristling hip hop loops and splayed beats - this certainly has a dark attitude. Meanwhile, Pigbucket Blam Blam (great title) fuses raw guitar chord strikes with further abstract beats - and melodies start to form by the time we reach a trio of tracks titled Infinite Collapse, where starkly imaginative programming on the third instalment produces chopped up vocal samples set to a stomping beat and seething cybernoise stabs. Quite original."
Barcode
"Striking electronica that allows downtempo to board and paints an abstract portrait of her. Laptop electronica has been really the chic thing to do for the last five or six years and is still building up steam. No one thought that hip-hop would enter in and add some of its own unique styles to the mix. Thats precisely what The Beeps is all aboutthe merging of experimental hip-hop with beat-driven laptop electronica. Loops thatll get you to dance with gritty breaks and gnarly jungle rhythms."
J-Sin, Smother
"And just when you start thinking 'where's the remix,' flip it to find Yoko Solo's techno colossus of a mix, breaking out of bhangra boog to Megatron studda steppin', old school dirty drums and heavy synth and tape manipulation. Hot shit..."
Doug Mosurak, Dusted Magazine
"From the detritus of the brilliant Pancake Circus come the Quake Trap Collective, of which Yoko Solo is a marauding, menacing tentacle. The Beeps would be his bleeding faucet of beats and squishy sounds, fermented in some dank Mission District kitchen far from fresh air and natural light. I recommend a shot of Fernet."
Toph One, XLR8R
"Bam. Brutal industrial noise. Bam. Schizophrenic big beat. That's right, there are beats (and sirens) that are Chemical Brothers/Renegade Soundwave big and block-rocking, snippets of hip-hop vocals, one note bass lines descended from speed garage, and loops of guitar riffs, with a touch of Mercks 8 bit obsession... Its not subtle, but like Japanese beat maker Com.A, the sophisticated array of reference points and general joy de vivre are infectious."
Matthew Levinson, Stylus
"most frequent readers know that tmwsiy* is a massive fan of four tet and his musings on in the electronic world, so there was definite intrigue when the last album from yoko solo showed up in the post. while true that both individuals are laptop jockeys making use of found sound and drum machines the results could not be more disparate. while kieran hebden dances along the line, brandon lasan goes over it and takes a darker beat to his electronica. at points his sound is closer to dj shadow, which is never a bad thing. overall the beeps is a compelling listen with points of distortion and feedback that somehow loop back onto themselves and come out full of beat on the other end. give your head some music for thought this afternoon."
TMWSIY*
"(The Beeps) continues with the mad, groove laden music that was very apparent in his first release, The Forbidden Channel (Vital Weekly 421). But I do not want you readers to think it is just the same old Yoko Solo music. In this venture, Yoko Solo prominently brings to the forefront his love for old school Hip Hop drum breaks and synth-bass lines to the mix. Hip Hop beats; bass synthlines andstuttered vocal snippets are in full effect throughout the remainder of the album, meshed together with Yokos mischievous and creative experimental electronic tweaking... this is a great and solid album."
Craig Nifong, Vital Weekly