Over the course of the past ten years, UK producer Rian Treanor has always kept his sound unpredictable and on the move. It would be easy to group him with the growing wave of heavily-online musicians blurring the lines between frenetic beat-based IDM and glitchy algorithmic experiments, but Treanor’s music doesn’t blur the lines as much as defy said lines entirely. Dense sound design is undeniably central to his work, but even at his most heady and cerebral Treanor never completely strays from his club background. In the past couple of years in particular, Treanor has pushed his sound to its absolute furthest limits, with thrilling results; Saccades, his collaboration with Acholi fiddle player Ocen James, stands as one of the most head-boggling albums of the 2020s.
On his latest release, Body Lapse, Treanor makes yet another sharp turn, teaming up with multidisciplinary artist, DJ, pedagogue and researcher Cara Tolmie. The melding of phonetic poetry, improvisation and left-field club music carries immense risk, and physical performance is central to Tolmie’s practice (this is only her second recorded release). But rather than being caged in by the limitations that the recorded format might present, Tolmie lets them push her even further. There’s never a sense that one might be missing out on a more physical performance because Tolmie allows that physicality to manifest entirely within her vocal stimuli. On the second track, ‘Incongruous Diva’, Tolmie delivers a caterwauling for the ages, one that would not be out of place over a skronked-out No Wave track but nonetheless perfectly compliments Treanor’s footwork-inflected nuclear meltdown beats. On ‘Sleep Guessings’, Treanor’s dizzying beatwork slows to a staggering halt, creating a dramatic feeling of tension that Tolmie just runs away with. She builds her voice up to a dense, layered forest of screams, at once closed-in and disquieted while also crying out to the cosmos.
Much of the album embodies a state of exhaustion in the face of algorithm-driven information overload, one that should resonate deeply with anyone living through the year 2025. The third track ‘Out Of’ sees Tolmie calmly intoning a series of phrases, each beginning with the word “out,” over an uncharacteristically minimal beat from Treanor. Her voice sounds like a sigh of resignation, building up to “Out of it… Out of touch… Out of juice… Out of… outness… Just out… Out of it.” The fact that both Tolmie and Treanor scale back for this track makes it even more unsettling than some of the more overtly intense moments on Body Lapse. At the same time, while one might presume that teaming up with a sound poet would push Treanor into more insular spaces, many of the beats on Body Lapse reflect Treanor at his most open and inviting. For someone whose first release was on a label titled The Death of Rave, one could easily picture tracks such as ‘My Little Loophole’ absolutely tearing up a rave. Amidst all the commotion, there’s a sense of ecstatic release in this music, one that reflects an understanding that the chaos of living and breathing in such a fucked-up space and time carries its own liberatory potential.
