Fighting with Swords: Two Lone Swordsmen

Imagine that little green men are invading. They have taken over governments, stores, even candy machines, and now they want to know the exact address of your sister's house party because of rumors like this: the DJ spins incredible drum and bass on the turntables, and the dancers are amazing.

This is a taste of Two Lone Swordsmen's recent release, Tiny Reminders. The album is chill-out music for the interludes in an intergalactic invasion. The best space lounges on Alpha Centauri are already spinning these grooves.

The Swordsmen are the collaborative effort of Andrew Weatherall, the former owner of the Emissions label, and Keith Tenniswood, the Emissions' engineer. The pair has remixed tracks and hammered out sparse electronic sounds since 1996. Now, after several albums, these electronic gurus have delivered an album that possesses a psychotic carnival music vibe ideal for some tripped-out grooving.

As such, the band is not easy listening. The grooves are disjointed and filled with sonic tweaks and squeaks of a higher caliber than the typical beats of a hyper-charged jungle tune. For an album that more than fulfills the promise of its title, Tiny Reminders manages to create a more artistic, yet introverted sound. The album provides a sonic blanket for the impassive New York winter, as on the track "Brootle," which recalls Massive Attack by way of the Horseshoe Nebula.

Indeed, Two Lone Swordsmen have a predilection for modest sonic landscapes, carved from spy-movie themes, funk drums, and skittering silences. Synthesizers fade in and out of the mix of scampering beats and polyrhythmic virtuosity, almost as if two swordsmen are dueling to conquer this music.

An example of British dance music at its most fluid and iconoclastic, The Swordsmen are not always a soothing sound to American ears. Tracks such as "Rotting Hill, Carnival" only provide melody after the listener has faced down a significant portion of beats and introductory blips, hesitations and ATARI synthesizer blares.

Tiny Reminders will never coax the curmudgeons at TRL into dancing, nor attract the interest of the average Britney Spears-wannabe; a steady diet of pop cultural narcissism does not inspire the album. The album still fails to transcend stereotypical, and perhaps self-imposed, barriers of British reserve, and few listeners outside of party circles will find its collection of subtle skittering beats and menacing spy grooves inspiring.

Two Lone Swordsmen,

Tiny Reminders, 2000, Warp Records, $18.97.