Mike Mangino – Coisas CD

Pivotal ’80s proto-techno-punk Mike Mangino ov Smersh coughs up an ace bunch of dark dub and house grooves in a patented livewire style for Joachim Nordwall’s iDEAL

As half of New Jersey’s prolific, grooving industrial unit Smersh alongside Chris Shepard (R.I.P), Mike Mangino’s efforts in the ‘80s and early ‘90 have exerted a vital influence on the past decade of DIY noise techno and lo-fi operators thanks to a string of prized Smersh reissues via Dark Entries and Knekelhuis. iDEAL founder Joachim Nordwall has followed Smersh since their cannily titled 1986 album ‘The Part of The Animal That People Don’t Like’, and more recently has been obsessing over Mangino’s SoundCloud page, which lead him to get in touch and promptly receive this hypnotic batch of deep house and moody machine dub workouts.

Judging from the seven trax of ‘Coisas’, it’s safe to say that Mangino’s music is still very much relevant to the underground and fringe electronic music communities. Like his early work, Mangino’s music still moves perpendicular to dub, noise, industrial and synth music, and since the late ‘80s it’s taken form as a sort of slanted house and brittle dub sound that indeed echoes with Joachim Nordwall’s own efforts as part of Börft Records in the early ‘90s, and nowadays as The iDEALIST.

Trustingly hand-picked by Nordwall, the set highlights Mangino’s tastes for cranky textures, melancholic atmospheres, and a personalised brand of sideways futurism. ‘Local Dub’ gets it going like one of Ilpo Väisänen’s killer Liima dubs, and the night crawling dub slug ‘Ramona Corner’ very cannily pitches up with very trippy effect. ‘The Way You Are’ follows with a full bodied, raw and sleepy dub house stride that’ tucked away Nu Groove style in ‘Slowly I Turned’, while ‘Nothing Changes’ returns to dwell in dub contemplation, and the whisked piano house of ’Solitaire’ gives way to something like a smudged Huerco S. dub in ‘Amphetamine Jitters’.