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| All Photo-Manipulations: October 2022 |
I get excited every time we enter a new phase - we've been through 4 or 5 so far I think, none of which I could foresee in advance. Any sense of foresight I thought I had has gone out of the window. It's hard enough just keeping up. He's been a solo artist par excellence for over a decade remember - his albums are rare, but he's always managed to retain a unique - often unsettlingly minimal signature, and distil his wealth of ideas into a coherent, timeless narrative. Now he is forced to work harder to hold the listener's attention, like a Ritalin-pumped arcade machine. We've always known that the division between politics and aesthetics was a false one, but the corporate elements here suggest that economics itself is a superseding aesthetic structure, one that develops forms virtually on its own out of raw humanity. It rapidly becomes clear this is more military: gun fingers high, it's a nightclub-death-march, whose political intent is like a shaky transmission of a now centuries old Diana Ross cut.
In the same vein as much of his previous work, there are no standout songs that would ever be at home without the context of an album. Occasional tracks suffer from absenteeism, but there are true moments of virtuosity. The weird friction here is just how personal it remains, how easy it is to toggle from the micro to the macro, from subjective empathetic mourning to a hyperrationalist inhuman perspective. The album throws horror soundtrack, sample library and j-pop records into a no man's land between grime, early dubstep and Chicago footwork. It's built on an historical electro continuum that binds the more strung-out aspects of bleep-rave, grime, trap-rap and footwork, with elegant little jazz and soul licks flickering like half-memories. It's a typically bumpy ride overstuffed with ideas and full of mind-bending rhythmic nuggets - a bumping bass line and a weird, almost annoying melodic figure that sounds like a helium balloon deflating. Intermittent shrieks and caws echo as if bouncing off wet concrete, the sounds of animals left in an abandoned zoo when every other person on the planet has been obliterated by an apocalyptic cataclysm. A muted shriek, somewhere between evening crickets and a wailing siren, sustains the barest of the atonal melody's tension.
This is not a light record. Birthed and incubated in London's most soot-smeared corners, it's a growling, menacing record, the sort of psycho-spiritual purge no subsequent contextual framework can subsume. It's sci-fi speculation but also gritty realism: dance music that does more, tugging on brains not just Friday night heart strings. This concept led the ex-philosophy lecturer to investigate the uneasy juxtaposition that terminal patients in hospital beds find themselves in, teetering on the edge of life in both a historical and mathematical context. In short, it's equal part body-horror, mind-fuck and drug trip. It's also the sound of an all-consuming global aesthetic and political structure that transforms the specificities of individual narratives into fleeting trajectories within a larger assemblage. Negation and omission here become the productive acts, the affective charge of the album found in the impression left from an element's absence. The concept of loss remains unarticulated, diffuse rather than pointed, environmental rather than declarative. I cannot listen to it as a classic record, picking my favourite tracks and skipping the fillers. It is much more like the hyperpolished non-binary transhumanism of certain strains of contemporary futurist sonology from the realms of hyperpop and beyond. The idea of drones replacing samurai brings up the question of what happens to us, or what will we do, when our presence is no longer required on this earth - these visions of disappearing humanity are all too human.
The closing credits roll in. You have managed to escape and survive. Ultimately though, the listening experience does not transport me into a hyperstitional future. Human emotion cracks through the album's fibreglass facade. The story is a mix of current events, history and speculation. I feel more catapulted into an alternative past, which was polluted with fragments and ideas from the future we are inhabiting at the moment. Most people's reality is far from a piano break, and the futurism, the dystopia is just extrapolation from that fact. As two mirrors are moved closer together inside a vacuum (which, contrary to popular belief, is assumed to be filled with electromagnetic waves), they create a true vacuum between them. It's probably not the optimum sonic hygiene for a critical listening experience, but it feels oddly appropriate. Sometimes it feels like one of the best records I've heard in recent memory, other times I wish it would just get to the point faster. But I think that's by design.
Musicians tend to be generous in death, in that they leave parts of themselves behind that continue to exist in a kind of domain of musical digital immortality. Anyone who buys this will receive the digital files immediately.
