"IF YOU WANT A VISION OF THE FUTURE, IMAGINE CRAP 808 SAMPLES STAMPING ON A HUMAN FACE- FOREVER"
The final months of 2010 see the sad dissolution of Thorsten Sideb0ard’s ever-brilliant Highpoint Lowlife label, who’ve been responsible for some of finest electronic transmissions to emerge over the last couple of years. 10-20’s small but formidable back catalogue has barely left my headphones since it first began to find its way into the world, all awash in grainy, pixilated fog, and the ongoing stream of releases from >Ruaridh Law< has never been anything less than entirely brilliant. His head-oriented experiments as The Village Orchestra explore the outer reaches of drone and ambient electronica while still remaining deeply emotionally affecting, but the Starry Wisdom EP under his truncated alias TVO was among 2009’s finest records, a set of six elegiac electro/techno hybrids, all shimmering melody and drum machine shrapnel. Thorsten chatted to us about the label and recorded a mix of some of its finest moments for DiS a few weeks ago, but with Highpoint Lowlife beginning to wind down a gap has immediately opened for an imprint that follows a similar musical and conceptual trajectory.
Ruaridh Law’s newly minted >Broken20< label has been in gestation for a while, but with direct involvement from two of Highpoint’s other key players, Erstlaub and Production Unit, and close connections with many others, it looks primed to step into that gap. As much as anything else, its promised aesthetic is deliciously vague, “an amorphous release schedule… concerned with decay, erosion, entropy; mistakes and errors; line noise and tape hiss; hum and buzz”, and couldn’t sound more Always Everything-friendly if it mixed some grime in there and chattered for hours about the hardcore continuum (note: it doesn’t). The first release, a sprawling double from Law himself entitled We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, takes in both sides of his musical personality: the first hour is a darkened head-trip, an hour long improvisation that offers a moodier, more contemplative alternative to last year’s I Can Hear The Sirens Singing Again, but the second half sees him rework segments into more recognisable dancefloor shapes. It certainly slots neatly into Law’s aim for the label, and should hopefully gather wider recognition come its release next month.
But in the interim period Broken20’s ongoing series of podcasts is absolutely worthy of investigation. The latest, Erik XVI’s wonderfully titled The Fading Splendour of a Technological Future, is one of the most confounding hours of music I’ve heard in a long while, slowing techno’s heartbeat pulse to a barely alive, 90bpm throb. In doing so its initially disturbing tempo brings into sharp focus elements of the music’s construction you might not have noticed before, and obscures its more obvious traits as though a camera lens has been turned the wrong way. Surprisingly though it maintains techno’s sense of restless urgency, but transforms it into a slightly different creature, replacing dancefloor dystopia with a sense of creeping dread. Something’s stirring in the background, but it never quite resolves, leaving a deadly feeling of unease in its wake. Totally immersive stuff, if not for the faint hearted.
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