Echoes

Jummatrix is a duo from north London, formed in 2004. David Ellis studied at the Royal College of Music in London whilst also doing a medical degree. He developed his interest in electronic music at university and set up an electronic music studio. He has written music for the stage, TV and film and spent some time as a freelance classical musician. Jummatrix's music crosses the divide between dance, techno, electronic and soundtrack, with an emphasis on atmosphere, melody and transparency.

Overplay review (2006):

"There’s that bit on Close Encounters of the Third Kind when the alien mother ship finally descends and succeeds in shattering every window within a five-mile radius with its ground-shaking rendition of the movie’s familiar five-note refrain. Now, imagine some of that action with added acid house beats and Miami Vice synths. It’ll give you a pretty good picture of the kind of space age symphonics conjured up by Jummatrix. The London duo’s ‘All The Worlds’ album is a saga in itself, with ten tracks of thrillingly epic computer generated strangeness. They claw in the influences from far and wide, but the end result is weird, wonderful and pretty unique.

Things get off to a relatively poppy start. The Orbitalesque "Don’t You See" piles on the acid bleeps and Jan Hammer keyboards as fractured vocal samples get filtered into oblivion. But, along with the sinister stabbing Prodigy beats of the closing "Cry," it’s the closest Jummatrix get to a straightforward dance track. For the most part, this is an album of movements and atmosphere. The title track is a digital pastoral as a nubile Donna Summer bassline drives gentle folky electronica. Meanwhile, the brooding "Echoes" gets lost in doomy monastic chants and glowering synths. Even "Reality Twist," which starts off with the kind of spiky beatboxing that could boost some of Eminem’s more acerbic rhymes, takes off into subtly delirious spirals of tribal chanting.

"Through The Past" and "Totem & Taboo" up the ante with nothing short of a Cyberman invasion. They’re all twinkly synths and silver-suited astro pounding; so it’s a contrast to suddenly get dunked in the gloomier waters of "Dark Matter." This is a splodgier, murkier and altogether more feral experience; as wet, dripping keyboards hint at hidden dangers with little beady eyes and several rows of teeth that are probably in a really bad mood. It’s the Dagobah of the Jummatrix galaxy.

For sheer loony eclecticism, though, the place to go here is "The Power Of Your Intellect." Choppy discordant clanging makes for a rough ride, but after a couple or three minutes you’re catapulted out onto waves of ambient bliss, before ending the trip in the midst of intense tribal energy. With bizarre mood swings every few minutes and epic techno touches, this is almost classical music for compulsive channel hoppers. And in a time of so much New Wave by numbers, it’s refreshing to hear a band confine verse/chorus/verse formulas to the cupboard under the stairs and set their sights on somewhere that’s way off the conventional pop music sat nav."


by overplay