Various Artists: 3x Various Artists: 3x (Dark Duck - 2000) Stephen Philips, Ben Summers, Alex Cornhill, Geoff Varosky andFelex Tendler are listed as contributers to this latest of Dark Duck's take on the Various Artists thing... only mixer/masterer Philip's knows who's who and what's what in the experimental sound-and-music flow of 3x, which comes with the tagline, "the hippie tribute, peace man!"... mind-altering stuff, but certainly not traditional hippie-fare! Scritchy vinyl-like pops accent Crm and its cheesy 60's-pop instrumental loop. Beneath a wavering ethnodrone, Mantra is beaten by hypnotic, evolving drum cycles. From the rough spacy void which opens Club a disparately loungey retrovibe emerges then is pumped up with more drums and stutteringly mutated speech, which -somehow - "works". The murky symphonics of "Rft abut the drift-and-drum sounds Mllw. From multiple sources, transmogrified words and radio voices buzz and flutter through Giag (6:20), becoming a radiating grey area, then adopting a guitar/drum loop before reverting to its original buzzily conversive state. Listen Kids has a little weird fun disfiguring the happy pep talk of some kid-counselor, turning his words into monstrously melting phrases. Thumping drums and corrosive textures thrum underneath the peppy piano-lite riff of Rattle Tick (2:48). Often more overtly musical (though systematically deluged in transformative effects, etc.) the multi-authored pieces of 3x fill almost-47-minutes with a hodge-podge of recombined Various Artists' glitchy, beaty, spacy, creamy and trippy sounds, which you surely will not hear anywhere else. 8.3 The Dark Duck website gives more info on its many offerings. This review posted April 30, 2001 AmbiEntrance © 2001-1997 by David J Opdyke (except CD cover art, rights retained by original owners).