ALWAYS EVERYTHING

THE VILLAGE ORCHESTRA // WE CAN REMEMBER IT FOR YOU WHOLESALE

We’ve taken the opportunity here on AE to rave about Ruaridh Law’s music before, but with his new album out today – and as the first release on his newly minted >Broken20< label – it seems a good excuse to waffle some more about it. His music as The Village Orchestra/TVO is a real shapeshifter, barely staying still for long enough to easily pin down. There are elements of almost everything in there, but his material as TVO, particularly last year’s stunning The Starry Wisdom EP and remixes for Erik XVI and LJ Kruzer, is pure, stone cold electro/techno. It’s dark and dubby, driven by rattling percussion that’s so rigid it becomes funky (in truly excellent Kraftwerk tradition), and sci-fi futuristic, without sacrificing the beautiful edge that’s so prevalent in his music under the non-abbreviated name. The Village Orchestra material is often concerned with many of the same associations the Broken20 homepage lists – “decay, erosion, entropy, mistakes and errors, line noise and tape hiss, hum and buzz” – and his album release for the label is split in two down the middle.

The first half is a recording of a live set, an hour’s improvisation entitled We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, that reassembles samples and fragments of memory into something not a million miles away from the best of Philip Jeck’s material: ambience, the static crackle of ancient vinyl and fucked electronics. It riffs on the title and subject matter, chewing up and spitting out everything that arrives within earshot. So it’s both unnerving and weirdly beautiful, and leaves a real sense of melancholy in its wake. Music for late nights and earlier mornings, basically. The rest of the album is made up of four TVO dancefloor(ish) remixes of segments of the live set, pulled into floor-ready shapes and given a radioactive blast of the same sort of nervous energy that made The Starry Wisdom so compelling. ‘Wasted Memory’ is the most floor ready of the lot, a heavy, jacking bit of funky techno (if such a thing could even be said to exist), but the others are just as good – ‘BC7 Memory’ is a gorgeous, spacey piece of dubbed-out techno that makes even Deepchord’s The Coldest Season seem positively joyous and upbeat by comparison.

But just as worth mentioning, and getting hold of, stat, despite its near-200MB size, is the first half of Law’s new podcast for Broken20. It is, I believe, intended to align with the album, and fit closely with the label’s ethos. Words from the label suggest the idea was “to try to blend as many artists and styles together to create a coherent tapestry of all the different facets that formed the idea for starting the label in the first place – this one primarily has drone, noise, ambient and sparse austere beats, with more rhythms, techno and dubstep in the part following.” Featuring in the first one is material from the likes of Ben Frost, Labradford, Coil, Tim Hecker and Emeralds, so go figure the general atmosphere there. It’s packed with more late night sounds, and in my half-emptied, freezing cold flat, it couldn’t sound more perfect.

>Download, along with tracklist, from here<

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Rory