INTERVIEWS

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.REVIEW OF the "SPEECHLESS" CD in StarPolish.com: Polar Levine, a/k/a Polarity/1, has been making textural music for roughly 20 years, creating an intriguing plate of jazz slapped with interference, loops and found noise.... The splicings are far from random -- Polar knows exactly what he's doing and why... I love the fact that Polarity/1 uses several live musicians instead of relying exclusively on samples; saxmaster Michael Blake is particularly adept at his craft. Polar succeeds in his mission of forcing you to pay attention and not lull into the sounds you "expect" to hear. However, the result is even more effective if you enjoy without reservations the sounds you hear instead.

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REVIEW OF "SPEECHLESS" in TheRecordIndustry.com:
Polarity/1 is the brainchild of NYC composer/producer/visual artist Polar Levine, who, when not making music, is running his own little spin of web subversion, with PopCultMedia. In it's entirety, Polarity/1's "Speechless" immediately strikes you as a lost soundtrack to some latenight & long forgotten acid trip. An electronic soup of beats, retro, tribal, and fragmented house peppered with bits of incoherent, nanosecond splices of altered speech snipits, off-time breaks, and unrecognizable audio from way back when, in pop cultures' collective consciousness. As a sample in one of the tracks states, "If you don't like the music, go out and make some of your own," but chances are that you will dig on this funky little electro unit. Highly recommended. Download the track and buy the damn CD already.

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REVIEW OF "Di Hard" from Yankin' The Food Chain: Recording Magazine:
"Di Hard" is a medium tempo groove with rapped and sung vocals, everything done by Polar except for exquisite backing vocals by Scott Parker Allen and Sabina Sciubba. The song is a comment on Princess Di's demise, the role of the media, and the times we live in, serious without becoming sentimentalized or preachy. An interesting exercise in a style that's very hard to pull off. We hear stylistic nods to Innervisions, Sugar Hill and Paisley Park, yet it's an entirely original project, taken from the polarity/1 CD "Yankin' The Food Chain."

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The song has so many segments, from sparse to complex, that it reads like a book. Tension, release, suspense, it's all there, yet none of the quieter moments feel weak, they are part of an overall plan that simply works.

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BBC ARTICLE ON SALMAN AHMAD AND POLAR ABOUT "NO MORE."

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REVIEW OF CD "Yankin' The Food Chain": MediaChannel.org:
Polarity/1: Yankin' The Food Chain (subTekst Records) It'as a group with attitude, musicians with mishigas and consciousness. Polarity/1 is a musical force unleashing some of the hippest beats and timely lyric on the scene. Who else takes on the testy relationship between blacks and jews with such honesty, affirming the common bonds that are often frayed in a song called "Howl." In "News Goo" Polarity/1 fires off a hip hop attack on media mergers and censorship of what matters. Sample line: "So where's the news of a people left out?/ Put a camera in my face to hear me shout/But they don't want to hear what I shout about." But Polarity/1 doesn't stop with safe subjects....Their "Di Hard" looks at the death of our late lamented Princess skewering both her media whore obsession and the disgusting attention paid to her by the paparazzi (and the men who hire them).

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I lean to the more timely newsy songs but no one is left out--the music is strong and the subjects varied. They'll be yankin' your chain if you let them. And you will be better for it!

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