when the irish aren’t too busy giving birth or inciting low-end religious insurgencies, they apparently also enjoy the age-old art of party-making. of course, this often involves borderline rhythmic, obese stereotypes clanging together semi-tuned spoons as they reappropriate the folk songs of yesteryear and yore over two cubic kilograms of guiness. but in the case of dublin lads (and possibly brothers?) jack byrne murphy and conor murphy, better known as hystereo (official, but out of date page and myspace) the party-making is of a much more nouveau, intensive order. while it’s hard to work out exactly what their deal is from the novelty history on offer on their homepage, their absolutely cranking output seems to render their biography somewhat superfluous.

first garnering serious attention in the UK back in 2005 with long-player corporate crimewave (which, i admit, completely passed me by) , they produced one of the few techno albums of the year with the occasional capacity to match vitalic’s blistering ok cowboy. while patchy, the album still has its share of truly scorching moments, ranging from out and out techno bangers through to more melodically infused electro pre-emptors. a sampling:

hystereo - validity revision [hard]

hystereo - deale [soft]

hystereo - let’s do it [medium]

but of more interest (well to me at any rate) has been their recent issuing of a sequence of absolutely devastating ‘rebrands’ (always good to have another synonym for remix… let’s see what else we can dig up) over the past year or so. while of a generally superior quality - at least as far as the face-meltingly hard end of the electro-tech spectrum goes - the two that have most stood out are their grinding re-styling of digitalism’s already anthemic ‘idealistic’ (released in september this year through the mighty kitsune), and their hard as fucking nails re-version of trashtalk’s already hard as fucking nails track ‘tank girl’. the opening of the latter also features one of the best drops you’re ever going to hear in electronic music. it makes me want to dance so hard i fear i may hurt myself. and others.

digitalism - idealistic (hystereo rebrand)

trashtalk - tank girl (hystereo rebrand)

the irish, ‘ey? who would’ve thought they had it in them. more tunes and remixes to be released by the hystereo boys in the near future, including some very tasty sounding re-creation work for breaks fave dj hyper, now previewable at their myspace. all other tunes available at beatport. re-spect.

-luke