The gamification of the music industry isn’t a choice anymore, it is part of the hustle and grind. As the discourse flits from topic to topic like a hummingbird, the actual art behind the wall of commerce gets brutally atomised. Instead of democratising music, platforms like TikTok have turned musicians into manic clowns: aggressively performing their next trick for a dead-end of likes and disembodied yellow thumbs. Music is part of an extended human centipede of content. Sometimes, it’s the least important bit.
So when an artist is truly disconnected from the machine, it’s not just an enviable flex of self confidence, it suggests they are operating on a higher plane of consciousness where commerce is truly anathema to the creative act, not just a necessary evil which corrodes the creator from the inside. Shackleton has been media-avoidant for the best part of 20 years. The Lancashire-born DJ who, thanks to the record label Skull Disco (which he co-founded with Appleblim), is eternally tied to genre experiments around dubstep, has been quietly backing out of the Main Room for years now. After taking himself off to Berlin in the late 2000s, he’s Kate-Bushed his life completely. Unplugging from the internet made him a mythical figure.
He’s not just a publicity refusenik, he’s a trend one. The music he continues to make, on new album Euphoria Bound, is a genre orphan. The bass is turned down or absent, verse/chorus/verse is a memory from another time and there’s a rich absence of programming. Instead, live percussion leads the way, clicks and whirrs feel their way into the sound, and audio textures snake and skirt into the listeners’ ears. The centre is hard to hold and purposefully so. This is an album that exists in dream states, oneiric in its exploration of textures. And as soon as there’s something approaching a collage approach, like on ‘Crushing Realities’ or opener ‘Elemental Dream’, it is swept away in favour of something more liquid. On ‘The Dream In Fragments’ glass chimes and tablas fill in where you’d expect a repeating motif or a vocal line.
Here, the darkened dancefloor doubles as the basement or cursed attic of a haunted house; the sticky floor smothered in blood not beer. The heartbeat is not the penetrating bass coming through the floor but a strange, unwordly hum in the pipes. Who needs to put a donk on it?
