ALWAYS EVERYTHING

RAIME // RAIME EP

It’s been a little quiet round our ends for the last couple of weeks, which now means there’s a wellspring of great music to shout about. The first release on Kiran Sande’s Blackest Ever Black imprint seems an appropriate place to start. It fits the label’s title perfectly – Raime’s debut EP is an intense and claustrophobic experience, its beats shrouded in such dense fog that it often feels as though the black vinyl they’re pressed onto is physically absorbing all available light surrounding it. Often it’s the records that appear from nowhere, with an almost total lack of supporting information or hype, that end up the most exciting, and there’s certainly a self-contained intensity to Raime’s music that hints at far more bubbling just beneath the surface.

It helps that it’s refreshingly difficult to work out exactly where his/her head lies; there are traces of Shackleton’s strung-out polyrhythms and the quasi-mystical minimalism of Loefah in ‘This Foundry’, but that track’s slowly rising chords and diffuse spray of percussive tics are set in a more thoughtful context. These tracks share dance music’s density and overwhelmingly physicality – my neighbours seem less than impressed with the pulsing martial drums of ‘Retread’, which hit like hammerblows to the chest – but they’re bleak, gothic and machinistic, sounding more like the product of some hellish dystopia waiting just out of view. If you cast your ears right into the burning skyline of ‘We Must Hunt Under The Wreckage Of Many Systems’, between the incessant thud of falling incendiaries you can almost detect the sad roar of collapsing (new) buildings.

It seems pretty counterintuitive to attempt to describe each individual track outside of its context, as the EP as a whole works beautifully, picking out icy paths between techno, dubstep, Faust and Einsturzende Neubauten. Woven together they create a totally immersive - though admittedly pitch black - soundworld. A slight remedy for the unusually pleasant end of September we’re having then, or at the very least a reminder that there are darker days still to come.

There are short clips available for perusal at Blackest Ever Black’s >Soundcloud<, plus an excellent mix by Raime for download, entitled ‘You Can’t Hide Your Headcrack’. Or just go ahead and >buy it<, it’s probably not likely to be around for very long.

Rory