ALWAYS EVERYTHING

12”S YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED

7. To Rococo Rot / Badawi (Shackleton Remixes)

Domino

>Buy To Rococo Rot Remix // Buy Badawi Remix<

Sam Shackleton hasn’t put a foot wrong. Even a cursory glance back at his release history over the last five or so years – Mordant Music, Skull Disco, Hotflush, remixes for Geiom, Harmonia & Eno and Moderat, now Perlon – shows an impressive absence of anything even approaching a dud. There’s been a subtle but definite progression in his sound and style though, as the earthy grit of his earlier music has rounded off to something a little more sleek and streamlined. I was, and still am, totally infatuated with the airy feel of last year’s Three EPs album and his starry-eyed remix of Ricardo Villalobos’ ‘Minimoonstar’, but there’s something primal and grounded about tracks like ‘Naked’ and ‘New Dawn’ that has dissipated a little as his music has begun to look to the future rather than the past.

In a piece for Drowned in Sound’s dubstep-ish week, celebrating his and Appleblim’s Skull Disco output, I described Shackleton’s earlier music asfilled ’with a Ballardian sense of society eating itself alive under the pressure of external forces’. In his recorded material at least (his live sets are another beast entirely, and really need to be seen to be believed) that sense of creeping, dystopian unease has been replaced with vaguer sentiments, but a couple of amazing recent remixes have ramped up the dread again. So this is again a bit of a cheat on the ‘12”s You Might Have Missed’ concept, as it’s actually a pair of them. Both have been around for quite a while now but seem to have largely slipped beneath the radar, which is a real shame, as they contain some of the best music Shack’s put out in quite a while. 

The first is his remix of Badawi’s ‘Dstry<All>Prfts’, which features the edgy baritone of Vengeance Tenfold – but far from reprising his slowed down vibes on ‘Death Is Not Final’ he operates at terrifying pace, coming across like a dancehall MC’s deeper, darker counterpart. The arrangement behind him is one of Shackleton’s most functional pieces of music, built out of little more than deadpan pulses of sub and percussive bursts of static, but the entire piece is spine chilling; it’s like taking a look into the wracked reality of an all-too-near future. By way of contrast his West Green Road remix of To Rococo Rot’s ‘Fridays’ is lush and humid, packed with found sound that echoes like the streets of an underwater city. The percussive high-end functions like the pitter-patter of rain, and the entire effect is like walking through that part of London on a stormy summer’s evening. 

Rory

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