It’s been a number of years since the last long player emerged from the cabinet of this Edinburgh legend, originally from the Borders town of Peebles, as it happens, but an Edinburgh legend nonetheless, following seminal early live shows at Nineties clubbing institutions Pure and Sativa.  Back then Landstrumm was signed to Peace Frog, a label which became synonymous with ground-breaking house and techno material throughout the decade and recently turned its hand to releasing bossa nova covers of new wave classics by French dinner-party favourites Nouvelle Vague and soulful covers of a multitude of weird and wonderful originals by Argentine-Swedish troubadour Jose Gonzalez (SAW/Kyliie’s Hand On Your Heart, The Knife’s amazing Heartbeats and Massive Attack’s equally sublime Teardrop among them).  How times have changed…  

Following output for Berlin techno behemoths Tresor and the establishment of his own Scandinavia imprint, and a five-year stint in New York, where Landstrumm re-trained to plough a fresh furrow as a visual artist and graphic designer, these recordings now arrive through Planet Mu, a label run by pioneering electronic music auteur Mike Paradinas and also currently home to Luke Vibert among other rave/post-rave stars.  And, sure to prompt a nostalgic sigh from many an ex-hedonist, rave is at the core of this body of tunes, too, as Landstrumm takes a few steps back in time to push things forward.  He retraces his influences through early Nineties Sheffield bleeps, UK break beat, electro and ragga styles (with the legendary Ragga Twins on hand to lend their distinctive patter) and then infuses the whole in the context of contemporary dubstep riddims and, the key to it all, an extremely large helping of BASS.  Not for the faint-hearted and something of an acquired taste, Restaurant Of Assassins is out of step (haha, no pun intended) with much of what currently passes for dance music* and all the more fresh for it.  But Landstrumm’s retro-futurist approach also pays large dividends under repeated listens, so if you’re not feeling this now, you will be in eighteen months when there are half a dozen copy-cats on the scene and the press are calling ‘ravestep’ the next big thing.    

*‘Nu rave’, anyone? Please, the Klaxons have got about as much funk as Curiosity Killed The Cat and about as much soul as Rick Astley, while the NME should come with a warning that most of the drivel it peddles is pure fiction and all of its clueless, spotty writers should be given detention and lines.  Something like “I must not try and make up new genres when I blatantly don’t know what I’m talking about” should sort them out.  Apparently all their writers have been banned from mentioning anything recorded before 1980, or some equally absurd notion, so that anyone who rips off any musical visionary from pre-1980 can henceforth be dressed up themselves as pioneering and, thus, iconic.  W@N&E£S!