"IF YOU WANT A VISION OF THE FUTURE, IMAGINE CRAP 808 SAMPLES STAMPING ON A HUMAN FACE- FOREVER"
Raime - If Anywhere was here he would know where we are (SHORT CLIP) by Blackest Ever Black
Forthcoming Dec 6th, Blackest Ever Black
Following an unbelievable debut that infiltrated everywhere from scene leading techno contingent, mnml ssgs, to Pitchfork blog collective Altered Zones, Raime returns on Kiran Sande’s Blackest Ever Black imprint with a follow up: If Anywhere Was Here He Would Know Where We Are. Considering the first 12” was built out of samples culled from all manner of experimental post punk (see Raime’s excellent You Can’t Hide Your Headcrack mixtape for a journey through that aesthetic), who better to contribute a remix than Downwards founder and Sandwell District contributor Regis? A staunch supporter of all things Industrial, its impossible to understate Regis’ continuation of that ethos through his work in the Birmingham techno scene. Whilst only a short clip of the A side is available right now, head to the 20 minute mark on mnml ssgs’ October mixtape to hear Regis’ sublime reworking of This Foundry, subtle machine movements gradually giving way to an overwhelming and all encompassing ethereality. Although slight, like the Raime EP the tracks go cavernously deep: music for a burnt out future that might be closer than we think.
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Simon
Dustin Wong // Live at The Hideout
Solo Guitar Record. Makes you shudder, doesn’t it? As I’m sure many others do, while reading descriptions of music I’ve got a mental shit-list that automatically kicks in when I see particular phrases: Future Garage. Five string bass. Twee. I know its gonna be a bumpy ride when one of these pops up. Solo Guitar Record is as a good a candidate as any for the list, instantly inspiring visions of sweaty troubadours, desperately practicing godawful, neo-classical fretboard thunder and arguing about guitar tone underneath Dragonforce youtubes. Dustin Wong’s second record outside of the “confines” of hyperactive, sugar-rush savants Ponytail positively demolishes all of these preconceptions however.
Dustin Wong - Infinite Love preview from Thrill Jockey Records on Vimeo.
Coming across more a hyper-coloured Electric Counterpoint than tireless (read: boring) fret ascension, Infinite Love is two takes on one majestic, machine-like composition, each presented on a separate CD/LP. Obvious reference points for loop-filled, frenetic mathematics will probably spring to mind within seconds of hitting play, but the record is far from a Don Caballero doppelganger. More closely aligned with the wave of Emeralds related material over the last year, Infinite Love’s gradual web weaving takes on an ethereal, psychedelic quality. Beautifully juxtaposing the labryinthine clockwork precision of the interlocking parts with the largely percussion-less whole, the record has the bizarre quality of feeling intensely propulsive and completely motionless all at once.
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Simon
Forthcoming Woe To The Septic Heart
It’s testament to the all encompassing attitude of dubstep pre-implosion that Shackleton is considered one of the all time pillars of the scene. Whilst its true that his Skull Disco label co-run with Appleblim stands up as one of the most well realised artistic statements related to the world of bass pressure- and indeed, the personnel and geography involved makes it seem easily categorisable - in retrospect the haunted tribalism he produced seems somewhat parallel, if not anomalous, to the majority of classic dubstep. The key principles of dread and heavy sub are all that relate, and its a shame that we no longer have that adventurous sense of inclusion, merely ever splintering scenes increasingly conforming to rules & regulations of those that came before.
With that said, and a personal disavowal of dubstep from the man himself, it’s not surprising that the intersection was fleeting. After Skull Disco was put to pasture (Rory wrote a fitting epitaph whilst curating DiS’ bass music week here) Shackleton’s music has radically diverged from what you might loosely call the old template. A lot has been made of his move to Berlin precipitating an absorption of techno tropes, something hinted at by Skull Disco remixers and seemingly confirmed by his appearance on Perlon for Three EPs. This all seems reductive though, as its hard to pinpoint very many producers who make techno like this, all gnarled spectres of some bizarre, unknowable paganism. Making percussive electronic music curses you to categorisation, separating the link between his true spiritual compatriots: 80s post punk experimentalists, the industrial & noise scenes, and all manner of non-Western musicians.
None of this changes on Shackleton’s inaugural release for his new imprint, “Woe To The Septic Heart!”. Bearing some thematic similarity to Skull Disco merely by name (something compounded by the return of sleeve designer Zeke Clough), ‘Man On A String Pt I&II’ and ‘Bastard Spirit’ are two more deadly transmissions from beyond the void. Built out of scraping, rusted percussion and powerfully spring-loaded polyrhythmic patterns, Shackleton unearths all of the elements of his back catalogue to date and reanimates them with newfound urgency. Simultaneously staggered by anchoring basslines and propelled by tense, tuned percussive salvos, its not surprising that he was invited to take part in the Congotronics remix project given the dizzying rhythmic interplay on display. Recent candidates for drum programmer prodigies du jour seem positively amateurish side by side, simple half time/double time dichotomies blitzed by stacks of doom-laden juxtapositions. What’s calm is fraught, where ambience- neuroticism. Precision is always a knife edge away from a nervous tic. All of these paths are explored in greater detail on the forthcoming Fabric 55, a monument which will quite likely usurp Villalobos’ incredible no. 36. For now, the beginning of something very special indeed. Skull Disco set the bar high, but Shackleton seems set to match, if not best it.
Samples can be heard on Boomkat, whilst ‘Bastard Spirit’ (né Busted Spirit) features on Shackleton’s amazing Mary Anne Hobbs farewell mix- hands down my favourite mix of the year.
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Simon
Oh man, another one…
It feels like we’ve been throwing around ‘… of the year!’ statements an awful lot lately, which I suppose is testament to the amount of great music being made at the moment. In just the last couple of months we’ve had an endless stream of material from Ramadanman, Jam City’s ‘Ecstasy Refix’, Hyetal’s ‘Phoenix’, his collaborative 12” with Peverelist and the murky funk of Elgato’s Hessle debut all vying for the top spot. And now Girl Unit’s dubplate cluster bomb ‘Wut’ finally arrives and immediately throws itself into the fray, all guns blazing.
Alongside Hyetal’s recent material, ‘Wut’ feels like another logical extension of post-garage music’s ongoing synth fixation, packing every space with as much artificial sound as physically possible, lest the effect be anything other than disorienting. But that doesn’t do an awful lot of justice to quite how massive it actually sounds, even bursting from a small pair of speakers. Though ‘IRL’ was justifiably overplayed, its dissonant 808 flurries sound positively underdeveloped by comparison, perfectly functional, but little else. Every time ‘Wut’ has found its way onto a floor in the last few months, the effect has been something similar to Kode9’s description of Joker’s earliest music – “group electrification”.
Beyond their immediate charms though, all three tracks on the Wut 12” tap very directly into the spaces we love to inhabit here at AE, exploring a subliminal region between different sounds to dizzying effect. In that sense Girl Unit’s music is almost entirely genre-less; if you had to pinpoint it, it’d probably be easiest to say ‘house’, but there’s so much going on it’s difficult to reduce it to that. The juke/footwork influence is still prevalent in the skittering drum hits that skate across its surface, and the halfstepped groove of dubstep propels it on the dancefloor, but the horror show gothic of ‘Every Time’ could almost be a sharply focused cousin to the druggy resonance of Salem’s King Night album, complete with a shredded, utterly fucked up vocal refrain. ‘Showstoppa’ detonates like grime, but rides a smoother, glassy rhythm until it gradually dissociates. And underpinning all three are loping, rolling grooves that betray a love for dirty south hip-hop, loose-limbed, sleaze-ridden and smokey.
There has been a lot of praise for the Night Slugs label this year, a fair proportion of which has been justified. Its output has been patchy, sure, but its heights have counted among 2010’s best – Mosca’s bass odyssey ‘Nike’; the cyclical buzz of Jam City’s ‘Ecstasy Refix’; now ‘Wut’ and its two companions. There’s a feeling on dancefloors at the moment that dubstep’s offspring are perhaps beginning to spread too thinly, perhaps losing a level of focus and coherence that was still very much present a year ago. It’s too early to say where it’ll coalesce next, but it’s still great to hear individual tracks that shine like beacons, daring others to follow.
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Rory
9. October - That Placid/Ewan Pearson Remix [Caravan]
It’s less than two weeks now until the first Caravan night kicks off in Bristol with a live performance from Kassem Mosse (stay tuned for the full scoop on that one later this week) so it seems appropriate to take a look back at the label’s most recent release. It’s quite possible you missed this – we did - as it crept out in a manner characteristic of Caravan: with only the slightest fanfare, creating only the slightest ripples on the surface of the Boomkat sphere.
If there’s one thing October’s label is always good for, it’s releasing masterfully odd pieces of house and techno that still somehow retain a warped sense of physical movement. It’s largely down to their subtlety – his own tracks acquire an entirely different energy on a big system with decent acoustics, with their tiny eddies of percussion and sub-bass suddenly acting as drivers rather than buoyancy devices. ‘Euro Dance Hit’ and ‘Flat Top Muscle’, for example, are metamorphic beasts, both built from individual analogue elements that whirr and clank ominously like heavy factory machinery. But place them in the context of a DJ set, either as tools or focal tracks, and their sparse, cool motion is replaced by something deeper and warmer. ‘Muscle Memory’, a brittle, broken take on dubstep, is even better, its waves of sub and doomy descending motif threatening to rip speakers to shreds as its energy transfers from electric to kinetic.
October’s latest, ‘That Placid’ is built along the same lines, from several elements that rub up awkwardly against one another. The friction generated somehow works, holding the track together rather than tearing it apart; it slowly builds tension over seven minutes, passing through batteries of motor city synth and wordless vocal chanting, before it’s all too much and its structure simply disintegrates. The Ewan Pearson remix on the flip, meanwhile, keeps the original’s essence intact but packs the surrounding gaps, grinding along with unsettling ‘the-machines-are-taking-over!’ menace. File alongside the rest of Caravan’s output: a distinct and compulsive take on house music. More like this please.
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Rory
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
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