ALWAYS EVERYTHING

SHACKLETON // FURTHER DOWN THE SPIRAL

With every release Sam Shackleton refines his music further, each new batch of tracks one more in a series of distillations that increasingly approach some sort of imaginary endpoint – silence, perhaps, or white noise, or sheer rhythm. In that I mean it’s becoming purer: further down his own unique wormhole, ever more distant from concerns of genre (using either dubstep or techno at this point feels reductive in the extreme) or any prevailing trends that exist beyond its self-contained universe. Even the defining lines between elements of his tracks are beginning to break down, as bass becomes a distant rumble, percussion is fuzzy edged, drones skitter like clouds of locusts. After the gritty earthiness of Skull Disco, where he remained most closely tied to soundsystem roots, 2009’s Three EPs felt like the beginning of this process, which his fabric55 mix then continued. This new pair of records for Honest Jons is another logical step forward, featuring three of his own tracks and throwing the floor open for kindred spirits Kevin Martin, Mordant Music and T++ to further twist them out of shape.

And in the mirror of their interpretations, Shackleton’s own music is cast into sharply silhouetted relief. Kevin Martin’s pair of remixes – one as The Bug, one as King Midas Sound – anchor ‘Deadman’ to its roots in noise and dub, and cast it into the UK’s dub lineage stretching forward from post-punk: The Pop Group, PiL, Cabaret Voltaire, Ekoplekz. The KMS ‘Death Dub’ is particularly glorious. Simultaneously light as air and heavy as rock, it nicks Shackleton’s own trick of removing most of the midrange to leave Hitomi’s vocal and gaseous drone adrift above a yawning chasm of sub-bass. Longtime affiliate T++’s take on ‘Fireworks’ is a potent reminder of its core function as dance music, tracing his usual unsteady faultlines between techno, two-step and deep oceanic dub. And Mordant Music’s ‘Undeadman’ solidifies the latent connection between Shackleton’s music and the sounds of the experimental underground, where fragments of pop music are passed through filters of time, space and human memory. 

Shackleton’s own tracks, some of which appeared on the fabric mix, benefit from being placed in context alongside some of his closest contemporaries: it serves to emphasise the rarified company he keeps in experimental and electronic circles. ‘Deadman’ should be instantly recognisable for anyone who’s seen him live in the last eight or nine months, pivoting around an unsteady mantra, “Everyone starts from point one”, drifting in and out of earshot across its length. Its real strength is its percussive backbone though, a wiry, snakelike conga roll that stretches like elastic, sending sine ripples pulsing outward through the track’s central nervous system. ‘Undeadman’ is, as its name suggests, a complete inversion, as though some strange disorder has gradually stripped the flesh from its bones, allowing flickering music box melodies to peep through its skinny frame. And ‘Fireworks’ is the most skeletal of the lot though, and a formidable step forward, subtly choral and almost sacred in tone. It feels like only a matter of time before film scores beckon.

Needless to say (especially with the gorgeous artwork from Zeke Clough and Trilogy Tapes’ Will Bankhead), another essential release from the man like Shack… 

—-

Rory