Now then, this is fun. In a piece at the end of last year about club music beginning to take embryonic shape within the wracked circuitry of the post-noise underground, I touched on the fact that many artists’ forays into scuzzy dance music weren’t yet fully mining the potential of that crossover space. However, the early part of this year has already been marked by a number of quite significant diversions from either side of the fence into that liminal zone. Many are featured below: Strategy on 100% Silk, Madteo, Laurel Halo as King Felix, Xosar. There and elsewhere, 2012 is beginning to warm up nicely. This edition also features more new 12"s from the Bristol engine room, some lovely, dusty techno from Claro Intelecto and new music from Berlin’s techno experimentalist Shed.
Claro Intelecto – Second Blood [Delsin]
Madteo – Bugler Gold Pt. 1 [Hinge Finger]
Strategy – Boxy Music [100% Silk]
King Felix – Spring EP [Liberation Technologies]
As well as the closing, beatless ‘FREAK’, Spring features three differing versions of the title track, riffs on a theme: a pair with juddering, diffuse rhythms that recall footwork and electro, and ‘SPRING2’, her stunning first foray into proper four-to-the-floor dance music. At only four minutes it’s painfully short, and all the more so given that its finest moment arrives during its final few seconds when the beat drops away and a human voice emerges, tentatively, from the surrounding mist. It’s been clear for quite a while now, but Halo continues to cement her place as one of the most exciting electronic musicians of this decade so far – both in her ability to wring a great deal of emotion and sensitivity from her machines, and for the way she makes our current internet-naive world feel like an exquisite, temporary creature to be cherished, rather than a dark presence to fret over.
Xosar – Ghosthaus EP [Rush Hour]
Peverelist – Erosions/Salt Water [Livity Sound]
Alex Coulton – Brooklyn/Candy Flip [Idle Hands]
People in the past have spoken of Pev’s tracks as being austere, as though their attention to rhythmic and textural detail somehow pushes them into the realms of the nerdy. That’s not something I’ve ever taken from them – to these ears, his is among the most heartfelt of UK-rooted club music. ‘Salt Water’s rhythms are organic in the extreme, and combined with the sustained synth that sweeps giddily through the track at around the halfway mark, the result is a veritable symphony of granular emotion. Props, too, to the very British touch during its closing seconds of near-silence, where a theremin warbling ominously into the distance provides a lovely little BBC moment.
Livity Sound, the trio of Pev, Kowton and Asusu, recently played their debut live show at Bristol’s Take Five Cafe – you can watch the video below. It bodes well for their future projects and the ongoing development of the Livity label, which so far has fostered a strong ethos of collaboration and co-operation between its three members. The film is by Tape Echo, the Bristolian site/collective/radio show/zine that over the last year or so has been keeping close tabs on ongoing developments there. It’s very much worth a look, and their paper ‘zine is cheap, beautiful and well worth a few quid. Check their website here.
Livity Sound live from Tape-Echo on Vimeo.
Shed – The Praetorian/RQ-170 [50 Weapons]
What makes Pawlowitz’s Shed music so appealing is its wish to broaden the parameters of ‘true techno music’. So he draws in sub-driven steppers’ rhythms influenced by dub and UK sounds (jungle, dubstep), as well as distilling club tracks down until they become pure expressions of the original idea. Much of his work, too, harks back to the earlier days of rave, steeped in the sort of dewy-eyed melody and prickly background ambience you might expect to find on a British jungle or electronica record from the nineties. Such a synthetic approach to techno chimes neatly with a world where YouTube mines new channels through dance music history, stripped of easily traceable chronologies. Thanks to his resolute interest in the world of now, Shed does so without invoking the dread notion of shallow nostalgia. This 12"s second track, ‘RQ-170’, addresses these ideas as directly as usual – rattling along at near drum & bass tempo, its offbeat sub pulses are pure jungle, while nearer the surface their bouncy momentum is stalled by crumbling percussion and the ominous whirrs of collapsing heavy machinery. An intriguing preview for the new album, suggesting it may well be Shed’s most wide-reaching to date.
