Cranko Pop [Soundcloud Review]

Back in the depths of Soundcloud, this time we’re having a look at the Cranko Pop account. Babbling along with links to nine tracks the artist picked from their Soundcloud account.

At the time of listening, I knew little about the roots and origins of the enigmatic Scottish producer known as Cranko Pop; except that his real name pointed to some relation to Nessie or some other sea monster.

Besides the treasures revealed by the sudden appearance and voluminous dumping of unreleased tracks by Aphex Twin and μ-Ziq. Possibly the best thing to result from those activities was a sort of polarising of the often quite fragmented communities on Soundcloud.

The track dumping and crazed frontier digging for hidden alt accounts created focal points of wandering discovery for many of the slightly hidden producers kicking out the jams from their respective holes amongst the vast warrens of Soundcloud.

Through comments and Soundcloud link throughs people were stumbling over each other, collaborations and friendships, things were happening.

Unless, of course, loads of them already knew each other from places like Muff Wiggler and WATMM. Which is no harm either.

Maybe people were bedroom producers, maybe those eight people were all sock puppets for someone testing out demos. It did not matter. Before the turning of the copyright screws, the platform seemed to experience a lush renaissance of splendid stuff.

There was, as you’d hope, a fierce amount of nonsense and taking the piss too.

Many of these accounts were putting out The New — pop and electronic music that sounded as if someone had fed Maxwell Smart’s shoe a lot of hallucinogenic drugs and then used it to call radio stations in parallel universes.

People like Cranko Pop putting out otherworldly smash-collisions of all that’d come before and more.

At times, it reminded of fragments of Benbecula and a smash of hardcore, rave and traditional folk music.

A producer, DJ, remixer, masher, sampler and prodigious sharer of sounds from about Soundcloud. The velocity of Cranko Pop’s output and variance can sometimes be hard to keep up with if you have any tendency to blink or have notifications turned off.

There’s no safe singular way to describe or simple box to put Cranko Pop’s account into and tracks can disappear or reappear changed as fast as new ones appear. Ranging from electronica to techno to ambient and on, to strange futurism, if you find the time, dig beyond the tracks linked here. Or wander over to “Bandcamp”:https://crankopop.bandcamp.com/ and throw some money at this wily and improbable artist.

This is an account to follow and watch. Both for quality tracks such as the linked below Empty Pulsar from their album on” Xephem Records”:http://xephemrecords.weebly.com/ and to benefit from the owner’s armadillo digging through Soundcloud.

For more Cranko Pop — check out their Soundcloud

For more Cranko Pop — check out their Bandcamp

Or, if busy, check out this, it’s nearly two hours of only Cranko Pop tracks. Skip in ten minutes to get to the good stuff though.

Big Thanks to Cranko Pop for taking the time to pick tracks and link them through.