Lifted - 1

Label: PAN

There’s an interesting tension that exists in the world of dance music between the ideal of innovation and its execution. As heavy consumers of electronic and dance music, we tire of hearing the same thing and long for something that feels new and exciting, yet in general our expectations of ‘new’ and ‘exciting’ fall within a very narrow margin of musical possibility – we still want our sturdy beat pattern and arresting melody, just with the variables tweaked in a fresh way. Ultimately the difference between critically lauded ‘forward-thinking’ dance music and the most generic tech-house imaginable is a little like the genetic difference between a human and a banana – absolutely crucial if you happen to be a human (/banana) or a dance-head, but rather minor if you’re looking at the situation from the outside. Example: would one of your friends who doesn’t listen to dance at home but casually enjoys it in the club actually hear a huge difference between your favourite underground house jam and the latest David Guetta single?

This is why, in a sense, when we encounter true innovation it first seems baffling rather than dazzling, given that it doesn’t conform to our very strict expectations of what ‘our music’ should be. Lifted’s debut album '1' is just such an example. Granted, this wouldn’t exactly be called dance music, and while the broader electronic music tag includes some sounds which could be distant relatives to this LP (perhaps Oneohtrix Point Never and Holly Herndon as second cousins, twice-removed), the fact that Lifted is in fact a collaboration of some of our dance scene’s most brilliant minds makes it a worthy inclusion to the debate.

Lifted is an artistic project in the truest sense. Future Times’ endlessly compelling Max D (Andrew Field-Pickering) has teamed up with Co La (Matthew Papich) to create an album of material which is damn near uncategorisable, enlisting the help of Jordan CGZ and Gigi Masin on the overdubs. The music, all sent remotely between the group with little physical contact and released on Bill Kouligas’ reliable PAN imprint, shows the team breaking free from the fetters of the 4/4 and conformist dance music, shooting joyously into the sky with a rush of featherweight free-jazz and synthwork.

The music of '1' is so removed from points of reference that it defies easy description. It’s slippery, and on first listen may prove challenging, hard to grab on to. But once the listener gets used to the album’s internal logic it’s a thrilling piece that feels genuinely liberated, experimental music which soars with a light playfulness not often found in music which so overtly defies convention.

There are two key ingredients to Lifted’s sound. One is its chaotic rhythms, more free jazz than house. Whether the drums are hyper-filtered on Intoo, tumbling beyond rhythm on 3D or occasionally courting the ghost of a 4/4 on Total Care Zero, the effervescent percussion provides a nimble base for the range of melodic experimentation that is the album’s other crucial ingredient. The synths glide like chrome on Intoo, drift opulently on the gorgeous Mint or sketch future-grime figures on album highlight Bell Slide, constantly giving something new to the listener. 1 even briefly comes down from its lysergic rush on a couple of lush piano pieces, Lift a gentle celestial voyage and Silver more earthy, evoking a hushed loss.

Lifted’s debut is the rare album which feels purely next-level, like music beamed from an idealised future. And on its best moments, like Mint or the sparkling chill of closer Medicated Yoga, that future is very jazzy indeed. The sound that the group have created is like an unstable chemical: constantly mutating, joyously effervescent. So few artists who chart fresh electronic terrain manage to do so with such lightness and joy in their sound. Because Lifted do, you won’t just follow them willingly – you’ll do it with a broad smile on your face.

8.5/10 

Untold - Doff / Phive

Label: Hemlock Black

It’s been almost a decade since dubstep lit up the UK scene, and in the intervening period we’ve had no comparable innovation, nothing as groundbreaking or as community-orientated. But dubstep didn’t make such a splash just because artists had come up with new ways to configure time signatures or plumb uncharted frequencies of sub bass. What set the scene alight was the sudden explosion of imagination and creativity in dance music, helmed by a crew of distinct, singular producers. These artists, such as Peverelist, Ramadanman, Shackleton, or Untold never stopped exploring, each release marked by a new colour, concept or playful invention. And it is telling that, though dubstep as we knew it is long gone, these producers remain, restlessly pushing boundaries and toying with sound. It is to them, rather than a 140bpm count or lashings of bass, that we owe much of the UK’s most exciting electronic music of the last decade.

Jack Dunning’s output as Untold is the work of a relentless shapeshifter. His early bass experiments swapped their colour for muscle and grit on the techno-focused Change In A Dynamic Environment series, before the inky Black Light Spiral LP crossed into increasingly unnerving, unhinged terrain. To inaugurate Hemlock’s Black sublabel we have Doff, two stripped techno compositions that show how Dunning’s work continues to mutate with unerring confidence. The title track pits hollow flurries of kicks against bass hits that sound like they’re being crushed out of existence. The militaristic tone, clean drums grafted onto distortions, is held in thrall to an unexpected guitar twang, isolated in the darkness and reverbed into oblivion. It’s cerebral yet brutalist, the abrupt halfway break leaving us disorientated by silence before those machine-gun kicks strike the listener right back into line.

B-side Phive is a more meditative cut, here the roles of melody and percussion inverted as the drums become a light rustling accompaniment to subtly interwoven guitar samples. There’s more of a sense of progression here too, an uneasy synth wash leading the latter half into uncharted scifi territory. These might not be particularly dancefloor friendly cuts, but their stark execution is challenging in the best way possible, midnight folk crossed with surgical techno experimentations. It’s bold and brutal, which is more or less exactly what we’ve come to expect from Untold.

7.5/10

Michael DeMaio - Half Cross

Label: Opal Tapes

Opal Tapes doesn’t really work like other labels. Aside from their pitch-black aesthetic and signature narcotised sound, the UK imprint helmed by Stephen Bishop (aka Basic House) put out all of their releases on cassette only until recently. Even when Bishop joined the online wagon he did it differently: every so often, seemingly when another batch of cassettes is ready to sell, he uploads a fistful of LPs onto the label’s Bandcamp for paid download. Considering that this is a label with a fanbase as slavering as any in the underground electronic spectrum, it all plays out a little like the long starvation before a feast.

So when it’s that time of the year, we pick our way through the latest offerings, many good, some great, secretly hoping to find another masterpiece like Patricia’s Body Issues LP from 2013. It might not be quite up there, but an album from the unknown (to our ears, at least) Michael DeMaio stood out from the pack this January. His LP Half Cross is an impressive work: swampy underworld sonics, crossed wires and profane frequencies.

Half Cross offers music as ambiguous as its cover art: is that a grimace of pleasure or pain? Across its six tracks, DeMaio establishes a strong central sound and explores it deftly, different paces and moods occupying the same ominous halflight.

The 11-minute title track is a real trip straight out of the gate. It takes its time to build over a shimmering ambient wash, before mutating into a murky house tune, with clashing hi-hats, desaturated chords and a pummelling kick that comes out in ragged bursts. Yet this is no outsider house by numbers: there’s an impressive range of rhythms that emerge and recede, generating real momentum where so many others would fall prey to inertia over ten minutes.

Nor is house necessarily the only order of the day. Across the album DeMaio proves adept at twisting sounds conventionally associated with IDM, ambient and experimental music to his own warped agenda. South is a stark construction of hi-hats like needles skating over echo-chamber handclaps and a diving bass hit. Each sound is crisp, isolated as if suspended in a vacuum. Then it all gives way to a distorted growl, where a ghostly vocal, brutalised beyond recognition shifts from threat to full-on horror. And then it’s gone. There’s a real flair for drama here, making for a very engaging listen despite the menace and humidity of DeMaio's sound.

Each tune is remarkably distinct for an album with such a coherent sound. The Blunt is a tougher trip, snares and hats cutting like daggers through a nervy ambient wash: this is more of a muscular club number, with a dreamy synth melody bringing it to an unexpectedly pretty close. Across Shatter and North DeMaio somewhat loses his energy. The former is an Actress-style meander into noodling synths and hollow snares, while the latter sports a hair-raising intro but gives way to industrial piston kicks and insectoid chittering. They’re atmospheric but disappointingly lacking in progression - though it could be argued that stasis is kind of the point here.

If those two tracks don’t quite seduce like the album’s first half, DeMaio certainly saved something special for a finale. Let me step out of my journalistic shoes for a moment and say how great the track title Knives Like Dresses is: the simile first works on the level of the visual, the corresponding shapes of the two objects bringing up a striking parallel. In terms of meaning, the reverse idea of ‘dresses like knives’ would already be great, unearthing the violence in a symbol of lightness and femininity. But by twisting it DeMaio conjures something more brilliantly unsettling – the elegance and beauty in an object of violence. The track is the album’s coup de grace, opening with a soup of corrosive distortion and mutilated vocals and having all appearances of continuing in the same vein. Then out of nowhere a shuddering kick arrives, frenetic, tripping and stumbling over itself but not shifting or letting up. There’s a raw brutality to it, an uncompromising ugliness which proves utterly consuming. As suddenly as it started, it's gone, leaving only echoes.

If this album is a building it’s a haunted castle: full of trapdoors, corridors at acute angles, surrounded by acres of twilit marshland. There’s a real power lurking here. Come and find it.

8/10

Shackleton - Freezing Opening Thawing

Label: Woe To The Septic Heart

Media coverage of Sam Shackleton takes constant pains to establish the singularity of his sound: Shackleton’s sound is without parallel… Shackleton still treads no path but his own. The constant emphasis on his music’s unique sonic DNA would be trite if it weren’t so irrefutably true. Over his career, from Skull Disco to 2012’s experimental long player, Shackleton has crafted a sonic language unto himself, with its own internal matrix of reference points which he continues to hone and revise over each consecutive release. Dazzling exercises in polyrhythm are the constant, while his sound has slowly shifted in its approach to timbre and colour: a brighter, cleaner aesthetic marking The Drawbar Organ EPs and this, his first release since 2012. While his reference points remain largely the same – dub and traditional African motifs alloyed to dubstep-inflected rhythmic experimentation – Shackleton retains a restless musical spirit, constantly offering challenging work which demands – and deserves – a great deal of the listener’s time.

Some aspects of Freezing Opening Thawing will be familiar to Shackleton’s fans, yet a new focus on polished synthetic textures is striking. These tracks embrace the artificiality of their sounds, sketching a crystal-sharp, synthesised rainforest bound to beguile and transfix weary ears. The title track is a deceptively expansive journey, where shifting percussive textures are electrified by an array of icy, computer-music synthlines. While most producers focus on texture and emotional resonance in their melodies, leaving percussion as a mere rhythmic skeleton, Shackleton here reverses this process: the subtle timbres of his drums are a melody unto themselves, counterpointed by the inhuman polish of treated organ notes. Thus the pressure is built around the contrast between humid rhythmic acrobatics and the sterilised sheen of the topline, and the effect is magnificent.

Closer White Flower With Silver Eye continues the journey into artificial textures slightly reminiscent of the digital/human interference patterns of Oneohtrix Point Never’s recent R Plus Seven, as roboticised choirs penetrate a dense field of intricate melodic and percussive programming. Central track Silver Keys takes a slightly different approach: conjuring a space-age jungle then injecting it with the dread of Shackleton’s musical past, where the bass growls like an Aboriginal call to arms, a sound which exudes mist and myth. Shackleton has one of the most unerring hit-rates in the world of dance music, yet it’s a great credit to his care and artistry that each new release remains surprising as well as enthralling - even if you were already expecting it to be good. It may only be three tracks long, but Freezing Opening Thawing offers an uncommonly rich musical experience, its inimitable sounds sure to echo in the listener’s mind and muscles long after the third track draws to a close.

8.5/10

Read this review in context at Inverted Audio

Roly Porter - Life Cycle of a Massive Star

Label: Subtext

Electronic music is an appropriate form to explore hefty emotional and existential concepts: as the music is a result of the careful sequencing of sounds and samples, the listener’s mind does not leap to associate it with the human who sings or plays instruments. Freed from this human association, electronic composition gains a curious sense of objectivity: standing as a complete product whose creation process is often incomprehensible, it can conjure the otherworldly, the fantastic and the terrifying in a way acoustic music cannot. As a tool to explore big themes it’s not just an apposite form, it’s downright liberating – yet within the market-driven musical sphere one seldom finds artists who choose ambition, who try to explore themes beyond love-, street-, or club-life.

From the opening bars of Roly Porter’s new album, Life Cycle of a Massive Star, it is clear that we are being offered something special. Following his work with pioneering dubstep duo Vex’d, Porter split from partner Kuedo to follow a darker, more abstract muse, fusing a clutch of genres from ambient to drone, dub to classical, culminating in his 2011 album Aftertime. Two years on, Porter’s second LP is an epic work, abstractly charting the creation and destruction of an interstellar body, and it's pulled off with an unparalleled sense of scale and emotional scope.

It may only last 35 minutes, but Life Cycle contains the richness of many albums three times its length. This is because it makes you think: using its cosmic themes, this LP is able to open a dialogue on mortality, tacitly questioning the significance of the human by contextualising him within an immense cosmic abyss. This sense of immensity is produced with sonic dualities: droney ambience is set against emotive orchestral figures, alienating blasts of noise nestled against intimate string sections. Rather than exploiting the hoary trope of techno as man vs. machine, Porter sets the human against the void, and the results are utterly captivating.

The word ‘cycle’ is key here: not only does human life move in cycles, but through the album’s central dualities the acts of creation and destruction are shown to be inextricably linked; death portrayed as another stage of the life process rather than its opposite. Opener Cloud contains clear human traces but its vocal sample is gravity-crushed, de-oxygenated and looped over a taut, juddering beat. The piece is astonishing to behold, gathering momentum as the beats jar like locked machinery, giving way to an ominous ambience which swallows those final strings.

Each sequence of Porter’s cycle is considered yet visceral, making an immediate impact and still rewarding detailed listening over repeated spins. Gravity contains several movements, its frightening intro of whirring machinery set starkly against subtle strings which build to a nakedly beautiful climax by the track’s close, swallowing the listener whole in a wash of reflective melancholy. Birth begins with what sounds like a vacuum gasping in air, flares of sound evoking the primal forces of the universe, here contrasted with stirring woodwind and choral movements which create a mesmerising dichotomy. The hypnosis continues on Sequence, a softer procession of drones and distant orchestras which moves with the glacial pace of stoic practitioners Stars of the Lid.

For his dramatic finale Porter configures Giant, a petrifying piece where abrasive squalls of stomach-churning noise are set against sudden silence, leaving the listener alarmed yet wholly receptive, emotionally rent open by the unpredictable textures of the previous thirty minutes. It’s a wild ride, yet for all the space present on Life Cycle of a Massive Star, it is not a work that exists in a vacuum. Its context is what makes the album shine, both sonically and spatially: brave sound calling out into the abyss, humans persevering despite the angst of insignificance both cosmic and human. This LP contains a universal sound: it is a sonic black hole which buckles the listener, forces patience and openness, and encourages us to hear differently. It is an awe-inspiring achievement.

9/10

Will Hardcore Ever Die? Techno's Resurrection of the Breakbeat

Hardcore will never die – we’ve all heard the old adage. Except over the last ten years, hardcore did kind of die. The breakbeat, once supreme champion of dancefloor percussion, just wasn’t cool anymore. Meanwhile all the genres that worshipped at the altar of these chopped funk breaks: drum’n’bass, jungle and hardcore, began to stagnate, left to the die-hards with their perma-gurns as the school of the new millennium turned to grime, garage and dubstep, or indeed back to the worthy institutions of house and techno. The use of breakbeats within hip hop has a long history and continues to bear fruit, but it’s only recently that the percussive style has seen a re-emergence in the dance sphere.

For years the breakbeat scenes haven’t seen much in the way of progress, the last notable exception being DnB’s Autonomic phase spearheaded by the likes of Instra:Mental and dBridge. Yet listen closely and the winds are changing: there has been a sharp increase in the use of breakbeats in modern dance music in 2013, whether they appear as retro ornaments or something altogether newer: conventional drum loops twisted, distorted and recontextualised into fresh shapes. While others have charted the re-emergence of new forms of drum and bass, this article will explore the practitioners who are recontextualising breakbeats at slower tempos, in techno and beyond. 

Paul Woolford - Mindwash

One of the men at the heart of this revival (and the inspiration for this article) is none other than man of the moment Paul Woolford, who is currently attracting all the right attention with the rugged productions of his Special Request moniker. With a name that references (perhaps even mourns) the pirate radio stations that birthed his sound, Woolford’s Special Request tracks are ferocious club monsters, where familiar breaks are squashed into tough technoid forms, glorifying hollow, compressed kicks and elastic breakbeat loops. Yet Woolford’s compositions are not just throwback. On each of his celebrated white label releases (along with an ace recent EP for Houndstooth), he adds a distinct flavour to the gritty soundcraft, keeping it personal and modern. For example, while the superb Mindwash may give way to a tear-streaked breakdown of breathy vocals and eternal synths in pure 90s style, it has at its core the restless pursuit of a maniacally sinuous melodic line which would only be heard this decade.

Pev – Aztec Chant

As most of the music that heavily used breakbeats hovered around the 160bpm mark, some of the more interesting re-appropriations of the beats have come from artists who have slowed them down. Livity Sound head-honcho Pev (formerly Peverelist) is one of the UK scene’s leading lights at the moment, honing an utterly unique style of techno which incorporates various elements of the UK’s hardcore and dubstep lineage. Hear on this year’s Aztec Chant how the breakbeat is just one of the track’s percussive components, nestled amidst panning melodics and frayed hi-hats, looping like a broken record until it finally takes centre stage for the track’s final two minutes. Yet it is not just scene stalwarts who are reclaiming the breakbeat: A Sagittariun, one of the country’s more intriguing new techno producers, constructs a moody scifi soundfield on his stylish Eye Against Eye, only for a slo-mo breakbeat to steal the scene, a perfect fit for the slick Detroit atmospherics.

DJ Haus – Cold As Ice

It’s not just individual producers who are looking to reclaim the hardcore sound: certain labels seem particularly intent on pushing the 90s revival. Chief among them is DJ Haus’ inimitable Unknown To The Unknown, who topped our list of 2012’s best labels. Besides a hilarious Youtube channel and bizzare cover-art, DJ Haus has used UTTU to resurrect some of dance music’s less popular genres, from electro to bassline garage. Proving that these old styles have life in them yet, some of UTTU’s breakbeat experiments have been pure gold: one need only look as far as Haus’ own Cold As Ice for an achingly cool lesson in hardcore, replete with a tacky synth breakdown which I wouldn’t have any other way. Elsewhere on the label, Lords Of Midnite’s excellent Drown In Ur Love EP took the breakbeat on a scifi odyssey for its epic analog title jam.

Andy Stott – Up The Box

We’ve seen a clear renewal of interest in the noble breakbeat, with a variety of artists co-opting those breakneck rhythms to their own ends. Yet outside of the dancefloor exists another group of hardcore operators, dealing with decay and disintegration, resulting in what is perhaps the most fascinating material that the breakbeat has to offer today. These artists can be loosely grouped around the experimental Modern Love and PAN imprints, the former’s Andy Stott being a perfect example. The formidable Up The Box, from his ace 2012 album Luxury Problems, is a semi-experimental piece which loops a locked breakbeat, jamming like machinery in a slowly building gale of static noise. After three minutes it drops away, and after a few atmospheric shifts returns with a phenomenal compressed kick in toe, an exhilarating fusion of jungle and techno that combines the tough distortion of each without even a moment’s relief. It may also be worth noting the possibility of Stott’s involvement in Modern Love’s ultra-limited Unknown / Hate project, a purist exercise in pitch-black junglism which yielded uncompromisingly destructive club tracks.

Demdike Stare - Collision

Further into the world of experimentation one comes across Demdike Stare’s recent Testpressing series, also out on Modern Love. Drawing on a profound knowledge of jungle, hardcore and noise, Collision saw the pair at their rawest yet, building four minutes of seething, heatsick noise around a bed of jammed, dysfunctional breakbeats. While Demdike turned jungle to noise, PAN’s Lee Gamble used his superb Diversions 1994-1996 to draw out the ambience of these tracks, dissolving breakbeats in the faded ambience of musical recall, turning the raves of the 90s into the incoherent, mesmerising sequences which now exist only in our memories. In a fitting parallel, a similar trick was pulled off by Anthony Naples on his remix of Special Request’s Mindwash, casting the legend of hardcore beneath the gauze of memory, eroded by time, subject to dissolution and fragmentation. These experimental re-appropriations of breakbeats treat the drum pattern as an artefact of its own time, and through recontextualising the familiar drum loop they pose questions about evolving musical trends and the unreliable nature of memory itself.

Tessela – Hackney Parrot

Before this article disintegrates, weighed down by the fragility of its pseudo-philosophical musings, it’s worth drawing attention to how current, how big these modern breakbeat iterations can also sound. On the following playlist you’ll hear a selection of some of the sounds discussed above, but also some genuinely innovative use of the classic drumloop – DJ Rashad’s minor masterpiece, the emotive Let It Go, which dissects breakbeats with the finesse of a surgeon, or Clouds’ ode to the rave thump on the monumental Future 1. Yet at the same time we have Dance’s curious Still, a ghostly slo-jam that leaves the breakbeat wholly intact, or Shed’s nuanced second outing as EQD, which ranks among the producers best work to date. Then there’s Tessela’s phenomenal Hackney Parrot, doubtless one of 2013’s most memorable anthems, guaranteed to get the crowd moving even if the dancers don’t know their breakbeat from their steak frites.

The lasting impression of this survey is the extraordinary versatility of this simple set of drum loops, which twenty years on are still being used and abused in the most fascinating, exhilarating fashions. Not only are artists continuing to insert breakbeats into showstopping underground hits, but the passage of time has permitted an artistic re-appraisal, with producers subjecting the drums to the decay of memory and time in a way which opens entirely new avenues of musical possibility. Will hardcore ever die? It’s up to the artists, but on the strength of the scene’s ability to appropriate and re-integrate artefacts of our musical past in ever-more innovative ways, it looks set to survive for a long while yet.

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Playlist

Tracklist:

DJ Rashad – Let It Go

A Sagittariun – Eye Against Eye

EQD – EQD 002B (04)

Clouds – Future 1
Point G - Braka

Special Request – Broken Dreams
Ramadanman - Don't Change For Me

Pangaea – Razz

Unknown / Hate – Human Resources
Deadboy - Nova

Special Request – Mindwash (Anthony Naples Eternal Mix)
Lowout - LAS

Dance – Still
Simoncino - Happy (DJ Sotofett Slow Jungle Trippin')

If you want more, check out Boomkat's ace series of playlists on 14tracks.