si-cut.db

With an alias as quirky as the music he releases under its banner, U.K. producer Douglas Benford's Si-Cut.db work combines sharp, fractured rhythms with sensuous, enveloping melodies and electronic textures, the results sounding far less opposed than one might first expect. The founder of the Suburbs of Hell label, Benford has released most of his music over the last few years on that imprint, including EPs and full-lengths, as Media Form, Radial Blend, and Minimal Resource Manipulation. Like artists such as Bisk, Atom Heart, and Elfish Echo, Benford manages an unlikely coherence from the most disjointed of materials, playing rhythmic chaos and sample-born sound collage off of calm, often quite lovely melodic figures. Although each project carries with it its own focus, Benford reserves Si-Cut.db for his most frenetic work, and has released several albums to date under that name, including 1995's Nuisance and 1997's fantastic Behind You, a collaboration with Robin Rimbaud of Scanner fame, released in cooperation with the Sprawl imprint. Benford has also performed live on a number of occasions at Rimbaud's Electronic Lounge, both as Si-Cut.db and in combination with other artists from his label. He also contributed several tracks to the Sprawl imprint's 1996 compilation The Broken Voice (which featured tracks by Scanner, Daniel Pemberton, and Immersion).
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