The eerie experience of navigating through the night as the streets are emptied out is encapsulated on ScanDisk, the debut album by London-based artist Partial Defrag. The record is distributed on a limited edition of fifty blue CDs, packaged in anti-static hard drive bags. Dissecting the ghostly industrial urban tissue, the six tracks are punctuated by the sounds of car engines, whispered voices, and club beats. Sterile and stale, the recorded city seems so strangely still, as if it was a distorted reflection of the silent space of a semi-compressed disk.
ScanDisk was originally conceived as a single, continuous piece and then broken up into six sections. The titles are obscure but could refer to trade names of real-life commercial ventures. Activating resistant immaterial frameworks through subversive soundscapes and digitally constructed environments, the album cryptically counters the economic exploitations of the modern-day systemic structures. ‘Elmelin’, for example, opens up the release. The title points to an international industrial insulation business. The track could be a recording of the fantastical future of a manufacturing plant, whose remains are recorded as factory-like snapshots and voices of long-forgotten staff, mixed and dispersed into an ethereal cosmic soundscape of digital debris. The album’s ambience of spatialised swooshes and textured timbres acts as a remembrance of the mundane striving for productivity. Conceived within a game engine, ScanDisk is also an invitation to play in physical reality.
Initially presented as an AV set in Spanners Club, ScanDisk is accompanied by three videos, created from 3D scans and phone footage of London’s industrial suburbs. Steering through the otherworldly sounds, sweeping through images of suburban streets, strewn with sewer grates, slowly steaming, the listener suffocates. The album encapsules the illusory promise of the still-sleeping metropolis. Extracted, codified and reassembled, the music resonates with the captured images and turns the album into an audiovisual archive of fragmented explorations of subterranean London.
