Posts Tagged ‘Bass’

Watch: ‘Pissed in the Baths’ by Polevaulter

Posted: 29 January 2024 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Leeds based militant dance-punk duo Polevaulter dropped their debut album ‘Hang Wave’ on Friday to widespread acclaim.

If you haven’t heard it yet, it’s a superb sonic assault of seismically sharp bass and loin-grinding beats, and we wrote about it at length recently.

Now following the album release and ahead of their UK / EU tour starting this week, Polevaulter have unveiled a brand-new video for the album’s latest single ‘Pissed In The Baths’, which you can watch here:

The sonic assault the two create is almost arrogant, fathered from the marriage of seismically sharp bass and loin-grinding beats. The words are quipped and brayed atop the aural landscape. They are boastful, accusing, repellent and inviting, they question and skewer the veins of masculinity, sexuality, the order of things, the music industry and the miserable reality of the North. Polevaulter have toured with JOHN, shared a stage with Thank, Mandy Indiana, Pink Turns Blue, Bambara, A Place To Bury Strangers, VR Sex, and others.

Now, following the album release and ahead of their UK / EU tour starting this week, Polevaulter have unveiled a brand new video for the album’s latest single ‘Pissed In The Baths’.

On writing the track, Polevaulter’s Jon Franz explains; “Pissed In The Baths came about from Dan’s chorus riff which he just pulled out of thin air, we made the verses more straight and got it to swing with my delay. I wrote the lyrics pretty quickly on a bus to the doctors, lyrically it’s about manifesting strength and about us setting sail, I tied the chorus into it as those lines came from a while ago about warming oceans and rising sea levels, it all got glued together.”

The result is a cacophonous injection of climate change activism, brimming with hypnotic beats and thick fuzzy bass and glossed in a coat of sharp unnerving darkness. Chaotic and smashing you in the face with its tidal wave of full-on noise and addictive shouted refrains, Polevaulter are not holding any punches with ‘Pissed In The Baths’ as they continue on their bulldozer-like mission to tear up boundaries.

Debut Polevaulter album ‘Hang Wave’, is a hard-hitting dark and fiercely off-kilter slab of awesome sickly noise alongside baritone-led lyricism acerbic, vitriolic and intense throughout, raising eyebrows and dropping jaws. The album features recent hits like ‘Trend’ and newly released single ‘Violently Ill’ which Polevaulter’s Jon Franz explains- “has more sparse vocals than most of our tracks, gives our music a chance to shine. Its maybe my favourite song on the album.” Other tracks like ‘Pissed In The Baths’, ‘Mint Condition’ and ‘Mia Goth Made Me Do It’ all stand out in what is essentially an absolute mind melting juggernaut of a punk electro dance record for 2024, which lays down the gauntlet from a studio perspective alongside Polevaulter’s diligent process to earnestly take the title of ‘hardest working band in showbusiness’.

Polevaulter weren’t always a duo though as Jon Franz recalls, “We were steaming along as a post-punk band with various noise elements and then lost some members over covid, but me and Dan wanted to keep going. We thought about starting a new band, but we felt that this still had legs. Ultimately, it’s not that different, me and Dan did most of the composition, and we’ve got a clear vision on what we want to do. After touring last year as a two-piece, figuring out whether we could even do it, we realised there’s definitely no reason to stop – and it’s definitely getting better every time we have a round of gigs. I like not carrying instruments around – that’s quite nice. Although, having said that, we’re a duo now and we have more amps, which is weird. Dan has three amps now, and I have two.”

The album was co-produced by longtime friend and artist Shaene Hunter which straddles confidently atop several themes, to which Jon Franz says, “This being our first album or our maiden voyage, I dunno why, but I like a lot of nautical terminology and see that kind of visual imagery when this album was being made. I also write a lot of lyrics about things that directly affect me, like my masculinity, my mind, about being tough and overly arrogant to sell the image of us we’ve created. We have a lot of reference points that I work in, and since we’ve become a two piece, I think there is a lot more depth to everything we do now. We’ve made ‘Hang Wave’ because it’s about time we made this kind of a statement about who we are, what we want to do and what we sound like after multiple line-up changes and situations slowed the progress me and Dan were desperate to make. Since we’ve been a two piece, we’ve got far more done, and we both feel really proud of this album, and we feel strongly that it will do what we need it to do.”

Polevaulter recently performed their debut album on repeat for 8 hours straight via a livestream to raise funds for the Gaza Sunbirds, a para cycling team based in the Gaza Strip. The team is currently providing emergency food parcels and aid to families sheltering around the Gaza Strip. Watch the livestream back here:

– And to donate visit: https://www.justgiving.com/page/polevaulterforgazasunbirds

Polevaulter will tour the UK and EU as follows:

Jan 31st – The Fenton, Leeds – Album launch

Feb 2nd – Hatch, Sheffield

Feb 3rd – Little Buildings, Newcastle

Feb 6th – New Adelphi, Hull

Feb 7th – The Lounge, Manchester

Feb 8th – Old Blue Last, London

Feb 9th – Bear Cave, Bournemouth w/ JOHN

Feb 10th – Craufurd Arms, Milton Keynes w/ JOHN

Feb 13th – DAda, Toulouse, France

Feb 14th – TBA, France

Feb 15th – Le Lezard, France

Feb 16th – Melody Maker, Rennes, France

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Modern Technology – Conditions of Worth

Posted: 4 October 2023 in Albums
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Human Worth – 13th October 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

From the moment Modern Technology blasted in with their eponymous debut EP, simultaneously launching the Human Worth label, it was clear that they were special. The duo made the most fucking incredible, low-slung, dense mean-ass noise going. The lyrics were social, political, and sharp, paired down to stark one-line declarations dissecting with absolute precision the fucked-up situation in which we find ourselves. And with a percentage of proceeds of every Human Worth release going to charity, they’ve put their money where their mouth is. It’s not done in some crass, virtue-signalling way: this is their model, and they just get on and do it. And through Human Worth they’ve released some – no, many – absolutely incredible records, rapidly establishing HW as purveyors of quality product with a keen ear for quality noise. In an increasingly fragmented and challenging musical market, the trick for any label is to find a niche and excel within it. And that’s precisely what these guys have done.

And all the while, as a band, Modern Technology just get better and better. Any concerns that they had said all they had to say following the EP and debut album Service Provider (as if there ever were any!) are allayed with the arrival of Conditions of Worth.

Lead single ‘Dead Air’ opens it up with dense, grinding anguish. Chris Clarke’s bass and vocals seem to have got heavier. Then again, so does Owen Gildersleeve’s drumming. But it’s more than just brutal abrasion. In the mid-track breakdown, things go clean and the tension in that picked bass note is enough to spasm the muscles and clench the brain. It’s brutal start to a brutal album.

‘Lurid Machines’ begins in a squall of feedback and wracked, anguished vocals, and it’s harrowing, the sound of pain. The lyrics are comparatively abstract, and all the more powerful for it. Written out in all block caps, they’re in your face but wide open to interpretation and elicit the conjuring of mental images:

WHY ARE THEY SO ALONE?

THE LIES THEY ALL SHARE

LET GO

INSIDE NOTHING GLOWS

BENEATH A SHADOWED PHONE

The drums and bass crawl in and grind out a low, slow dirge, Clarke’s vocals are down in the mix and you feel yourself being dragged into a chasm of darkness.

These are harrowing times, and if the pandemic seemed like a living nightmare, it seems it was only the preface. The ‘new normal’ is not the utopia some commentators suggested it may be. For a moment, it looked as though we would achieve the golden goal of the work/life balance, that we may abandon the commute and save hours a week for ourselves and slash our carbon emissions in the process. But no. Fuck that. Get back to the office, tough shit that fuel prices are rocketing and bollocks to the anxiety you developed in lockdown and bollocks to the environment because power trumps everything. Government power, corporate power, media power… we are all fucked and have no hope of breaking this. And this is the backdrop to Conditions of Worth.

They pick up the pace and start ‘Salvation’ with an uncharacteristically uptempo stoner rock vibe, but around the midpoint they flip things, slowing the pace and opening up towering cathedrals of sound as a backdrop to painting a stark depiction of life on earth.

WIDESPREAD

FAMINE

WIDESPREAD

CONFLICT

WIDESPREAD

PANIC

WIDESPREAD

SHADOW

The song ends with just a spare, fragile but earthy bass that calls to mind Neurosis and Kowloon walled City. It’s this loamy, organic texture which defines the altogether more minimal ‘The Space Between’, the first of the album’s two longer pieces, with the second being the ten-minute title track. It’s here that their evolution is perhaps most evident, as they stretch the parameters of their compositions to forge such megalithic works and really push the limits of their two-piece arrangement. In contrast, there’s the super-concise ‘Fully Detached’, , and the last track, ‘ Believieer’, which are absolute hardcore ragers, clocking in with short running times, the former just making a minute and fourteen seconds. And the variety on display here only adds to the album’s impact. While each track hits hard, the overall impact is obliterating.

They crank up the volume and the shades of distortion in the explosive choruses of ‘Lane Control’ – because you can never have too many effects when it comes to bass played like guitar and blasting screaming noise to articulate feelings, and as for the title track… it’s an absolute beast, with heavy hints of latter-day Killing Joke in the mix as they flay mercilessly at a pulverising riff. The noise builds and the vocals sink beneath it all and you’re left feeling dazed.

But more than that, there’s something about the production on Conditions of Worth that’s deeply affecting. There’s a skull-crushing sonic density, but also simultaneously, remarkable separation and sonic clarity. These elements only make it his harder.

Conditions of Worth is more than just heavy. It leaves you feeling hollowed out, drained, weak. This is life, and this album is the perfect articulation.

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Sara Persico – Boundary

Posted: 13 March 2023 in Singles and EPs
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Karlrecords – 10th March 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

When I started out reviewing, I always thought how cool it would be to get to hear new releases by acts I like in advance, and to opine on the latest releases by acts familiar to many. But I’ve come to realise that the real joy – and what I now see as my purpose – is to discover and share new and lesser-known artists. It is a gift which keeps on giving, for I hear so many people in my demographic moan about the lack of any decent new music. It’s simply not true: they’re just not looking in the right places (and their idea of ‘decent’ music tends to be rooted in their youth and coloured with nostalgia, which is sad really. Opening one’s ears and opening one’s mind is the key to keeping young. Or something). Of course, it’s always subjective, but there is a rare exhilaration and delight in – after all this time – hearing something that doesn’t sound like anything else.

And so here we have the debut EP from Sara Persico, which prefaces a full album in the pipeline. It doesn’t remind me of anything – but it does give me a rush, but also chills me to the bone.

It’s dark and it’s stark, and it’s challenging.

According to her bio, she was ‘born and raised in Naples, Berlin-based sound artist/vocalist Sara Persico cut her teeth experimenting on the fringes of Naples’ fiery underground experimental/noise scene, developing a technique that would integrate her voice with analogue electronics, field recordings, and samples.’

Fiery would be a fair description of the six tracks on Boundary, released on cassette. It’s big on bass and beats. Big big big. The percussion bashes at the cerebellum and kicks the cerebral cortex, while bass resonates through every fibre of the body. This dense and weighty stuff. It’s the elements of dance music slowed to a glacial crawl. Instead of making you want to move, it absolutely freezes you solid, tense, immobile. And as for Persico’s voice – it’s something else. She sounds tortured, trapped, and transcendental.

Stripping things back to a stammering, glitched drone on ‘Exit’, she switches between ethereal lilt to banshee howl, and the two are overlaid in a sonic collage that’s compelling and terrifying simultaneously. ‘Under the Raw Light’ is tense, aggressive, even, in its ferocious beats and Persico’s voice that sounds as if it’s coming from the other side, frenzied, tortured. In contrast, the closer, Umbilical’ is a disconcerting spoken word work pitched against a thudding heartbeat and muffled bass. It leaves you feeling… what? Detached, in some way.

Despite being built around familiar elements, Boundary doesn’t sound like anything else, and launches Sara Persico as a unique and exciting voice.

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Watch: ‘From The Mouths Of Beasts’ by Biomechanimal

Posted: 16 November 2022 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Industrial metal band, Biomechanimal has just unleashed their epic new single and video, ‘From The Mouths Of Beasts’. The song is a celebration of all the music that became part of Biomechanimal’s influence; hard beats, epic orchestras, and a complete lack of reliance on genre boundaries.

’From The Mouths Of Beasts’ is a take on the phrase, ‘from the mouths of babes’, a concept in which children have a way of telling magnificent truths in their innocence. ‘From the mouths of beasts’ is the reverse of this.

We are surrounded by people, especially in the music industry, who use and use people, taking what they want from others, spouting whatever they like to get what the want. These people are incapable of truth and innocence. This is a song about them. Lines like ‘devolve to entropy’, ‘burn up my wings’, describe the effect these people have on others.

Recorded at Monolith Studio, "’rom the Mouth of Beasts’ s the focal point of the band’s efforts to reimagine themselves into something heavier, ferocious, and dramatic. Says Matt Simpson, “We wanted to commit to being as authentic as possible, with all our new material using studio drums (a first for the band)”. ‘From The Mouths Of Beasts’ is a far cry from Biomechanimal’s industrial and EBM beginnings.

Check the video here:

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Biomechanimal are a genre-smashing act from London, UK, mixing harsh vocals with massive bass design, huge guitars, and pounding kick drums. The brainchild of Matt Simpson, and active since 2013, the act have played from Finland to Australia, but are most often found in Slimelight, their home stomping ground, and have played shows with 3TEETH, Hocico, Aesthetic Perfection, and many more.

Biomechanimal has reinvented itself as one of the foremost bass acts in the UK, mixing the signature sound of the London underground with the brutal theatrical drama of orchestral metal. The proof is, of course, in the pudding, which has been sampled by venues all over Europe. After a string of releases in 2021 (including a vocal feature on Matteo Tura’s midtempo masterpiece Corrupt), the band has now unleashed their next single, "From the Mouth of Beasts" ahead of the upcoming EP.

Fronted by Matthew L. Simpson on production and vocals, Kekko Stefano Biogora on drums, Sarunas Brazionis on guitar, and Keith Kamholz on mixing & mastering, Biomechanimal is pulling out all the stops with a sound that is as menacing as it is immersive.

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9 o’clock Nasty – Existential Dread

Posted: 6 October 2022 in Singles and EPs
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3rd September 2022

James Wells

Naff name, great tune, relatable content. I know precisely nothing about this band, and the scant info online suggests they haven’t really decided anything either. The Leicester-based post-millennial music-collective have been described as purveyors of ‘proletarian garage rock’.

Maybe that’s what it is. It’s definitely noisy, and it’s brief, the sound of the band in a hurry to say their piece and get the hell out of the way.

‘Existential Dread’ is an ominous, bass-driven, bowel-churning slab of hard psychedelia that’s driven by thunderous, propellant drums with choppy, echoed guitars and needling synths – or heavily processed lead guitar – over it. Initially, I’m thinking The Black Angels, but his is harder, darker, punkier, and it’s totally exhilarating and totally relevant.

We’re fucked. All of us. One way or another. If you’re not tense with existential dread, you’re either incredibly rich or incredibly stupid, or both. This is the soundtrack to the shit we’re living through. It’s real, it’s sharp. It’s not comfortable: just face it. Embrace the dread.

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Pound Land – Pound Land Plus

Posted: 25 June 2022 in Albums
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Cruel Nature Records – 24th June 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

Hot on the heels of second album Can’t Be Arsed, Cruel Nature have repackaged the eponymous debut from the Manchester makers of ‘kitchen sink punk for the 21st century with a whole side’s worth of remixes from both previous releases – including two pretty radical reworkings of snarling single cut ‘Brain Driver’.

First, to revisit the debut – it’s a primitive, noisy document of disaffection. Adam Stone’s drawling, sneering vocal style is vintage punk, less about holding a tune as conveying attitude, and from the off they set the tone with the seven-minute ‘Food Chain’. A thick, dirty bass grinds out just a couple of notes over a plodding drum while Stone vomits vitriol. If ever a track encapsulated the monotonous drudgery of existing in Boris Johnson’s Britain, this is it. Most of the songs churn away for around seven minutes, but if you’re wondering just how far a band can push low, slow, trudging bass repeating the same simple motif atop a plodding beat, then the answer lies in ‘Half Priced Chickens’ – and the answer is just shy of fourteen minutes. This quarter-hour slog is a gloomy, dark, monotonous trudge: the kick drum sounds like a wet lump of wood, and the sneering shoutiness is replaced by a blank monotone spoken word, and in combination, they create an oppressive sonic fug. The scenes depicted are mundane. Words drift in and out – mobility scooters, office, boyfriend, cough mixture, cheese pasty – and these objects assume bleak resonance as you ask yourself, ‘is this it? Is this life?’ and the answer is there, slumped, devoid of energy, eyelids half closed: yes, this is life. And this is as good as it gets. And it’s fucking endless. Until it ends, in a swampy morass of slow decayed distortion and noise.

The final track, ‘Bunker’ locks into an uptempo groove, but while the drums rattle and bounce away, the mood remains tense, equal parts The Fall and Uniform. As the track progresses, so the anguish builds, and the effect is cumulative Stone hollers roughly about world war as feedback wails and the bass and drums just batter on, and on. Same old, same old…

There’s nothing pretty about Pound Land – the band or the album – and this is a good thing: they deal with the gritty reality of living in shit times. Pound Land articulates the languorous torpor of demotivation, of waking daily to feel the aching anguish of being beaten by life, every minute of every day. Sonically, it’s a long, long way from early Swans, but the density and oppression are very much shared aspects.

By the end of the five tracks, you’re absolutely harrowed and drained.

The remixes are a nice addition, though. The Ruffians on the Train Remix of ‘Brain Driver’ ventures into swampy, almost avant-jazz / trip-hop territory, before kicking into gnarly space-rock swirl. The drums are crisp but overloading, while the bass is pure punishment. Where remixes for most other bands are either dancier or more ambient or whatever, this set – with three of the six from R.O.D., these are primarily exercises in accentuating the gnarliness of the originals, with everything simply sounding even heavier, more crushing.

Pound Land is the real soundtrack to the now. They may have to change their name to Tenner Land before the year’s out the way things are going, so you’d be wise to bag this while you can, and hunker down before things get really tough…

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Acid Youth – Reverse Darkness EP

Posted: 19 June 2022 in Singles and EPs
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MFZ Records – 24th June 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

Conceived and recorded between the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022, this set reflects ‘the everyday troubles Davide [Nicosia, aka Acid Youth], deals with as an individual but also as part of a community’.

The title refers to his ‘desire to get out of the gloom and seek for a reassuring light’, and explores this theme by the vehicle of dance music exploiting the vintage Roland TB-303, produced only for a short time between 1981 and 84. It was supposed to sound like a bass guitar. It didn’t. Of course, it would later come to be appreciated, and Reverse Darkness is a concise encapsulation of the appeal of these vintage analogue machines.

Against shuffling drums – heavy echoed with some thudding bass beats – there are simmering synths that drift and wash, and a flock of fluttering tweets, all underpinned by a thick, bouncing bass groove, ‘Vibrato Brilliance’ is simultaneously sparse yet dense, and Nicosia really starts to warp things up on the dislocated retro-futurist title track.

Acid Youth very much captures not only the sound but also the feel of those early 80s dance cuts, the kind of meandering, gloopy synth works that appeared on soundtracks of movies where computers had green text on little monitors and neon lights were synonymous with the future. Being nine or ten in 1985, it felt exciting; with hindsight, it feels like the future we ended up with is a whole lot less of a rush, but hearing this inspires a kind of nostalgia, not for anything specific, but for a feeling, a sense of a near future, thanks to rapidly evolving technologies, that held near-infinite potential. Setting aside any gloom over the disappointment that those potentials now feel chronically unfulfilled as we stumble through every dystopia ever envisioned rolled into one colossal morass of shit on shit, Reverse Darkness tugs me back to the crackle of excitement that once coursed through culture.

He goes really deep on the uptempo ‘Modded Dub’, full-on bass squelch wobbling and rippling atop an insistent kick drum – but it’s toppy, and really packs a punch towards the chest rather than the gut, and in context creates a different kind of tension by way of the contrast with the thick, bassy bass, and it’s true – they don’t make ‘em like they used to.

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Dälek – Precipice

Posted: 15 May 2022 in Albums
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Ipecac Recordings – 29th April 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

Dälek emerged in the late 90s when hip-hop was transforming in all directions. But while the Wu-Tang Clan and their offshoot projects had a level of dynamism and radicalism about them, it’s no understatement that Dälek shattered through their achievements, and if there was any debate about that, then Precipice really should settle it. It’s felt like we’ve been teetering on the edge of a precipice for a long time, and that pre-millennium tension has, over time, proven justified as the entire world careers into some kind of end-of-days chaos. If this sounds like some hysterical end-of-days paranoia panic, you’re probably not paying attention. The pandemic was just a sideshow, a distraction from global tension, climate change… Trump, Brexit, the war in Ukraine and the threat of nuclear war stepped up to levels not seen since the 80s… Are we still at the edge of the precipice, or have we just tipped – or powered, full-throttle – over it? I’m too dazed and bewildered to know, but Dälek have provided a soundtrack that conveys the sense of confusion and dislocation brought on by uncertainty and tension.

‘Lest We Forget’ is a mid-shade, mid-tempo swell of ambience that swirls around densely before ‘Boycott’ hits hard and heavy. Christ, that booming bass! That eddying noise that drones and warps! The beats! Man, the fucking beats! They’re heavy alright, and there’s no let up on ‘Decimation (Dis Nation)’.

If so much mainstream contemporary hip-hop has been overtly commercial, with Precipice, Dälek remind that hip-hop’s origins were a voice of protest, of antagonism toward the mainstream, against the government, against oppression, against suppression. N.W.A were telling it like it is with ‘Fuck Tha Police’, and fuck shit, nothing has changed thirty-four years later.

Dälek are a whole lot more subtle and less up-front and in your face in their antagonism, but they’re no less aggrieved, and no less political. This means that their impact is just as powerful, albeit in different ways, and sonically, Dälek are devastating. There’s a physicality to their music, and where the lyrics aren’t necessarily so prominent, the weight of the beats, the density of the bass and the murk of the midrange combine to create a force like colliding with a wall of breeze blocks.

‘The Harbingers’ slows things down, and it’s dark, stark, the atmosphere desperate, desolate, while ‘Devotion (when I cry the wind disappears)’ feels almost uplifting as the synths soar and their subtle, sonorous sounds swoop upwards before the seven-minute ‘A Heretic’s Inheritance’ crashes in, hard, cyclical, heavy, an urgent throbbing riff marking the intro amidst a maelstrom of scratching feedback and extraneous noise. It throbs and thrums, and this isn’t hip-hop like you get on the radio, it’s not the shit—hop of the mainstream beloved by the masses. No, this is fucking brutal, and it kicks and punches hard, repeatedly, leaving you winded, breathless, gurgling., while MC dälek repeats the mantra ‘I hold myself to high standards / I don’t give a fuck if the gods are angry’. No doubt that applies to the gods of capital. Fuck them.

The title track is weightier still, and it’s positively skull-crushing, and it goes to show that it doesn’t have to be metal to be heavy, and the final track, ‘Incite’ is stark, tense, and gloomy, rounding off an album that packs a lot of weight and tension. It’s hard to place exactly how it feels as an experience, and how it sits, musically. Precipice is the sound of dislocation, of alienation. It’s real life.

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Mycrotom – Ratoratiyo

Posted: 2 June 2021 in Albums
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Mongkong Music – mkng-01

Digital release date: 4th June 2021 / Physical release date: 4th July 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

Having been introduced to the world of microtonal experimentation around a decade ago, I’ve found a certain fascination in those close lenses on the most minute of details – the musical equivalent of peering through a microscope and seeing objects and life forms on a granular, even cellular level. I’ve also learned that anything that can be rendered or viewed from a micro level, it’s probably been done, or otherwise is within someone’s sites to do, or I simply haven’t found it yet. Take, for example, the ensemble Microtub – not a small bath, but a trio of microtonal tubas.

Mycrotom is not a microtonal tom drum, nor a microtonal extension of the work of the Vegetable Orchestra (a ten-piece collective based in Vienna who make music using instruments crafted from actual fresh vegetables). In fact, the moniker is somewhat misleading, for as the press release notes, ‘Tom Simonetti alias mycrotom has created rather large-format sound carpets in the Bertolt Brecht mechanical engineering city of Augsburg. He now presents the same: soundscapes on which you can go out of work and walk away.’

So, it’s actually about sound carpets. I have to confess that I chuckled a little on reading that, before reminding myself of my own habit of describing works as ‘sonic tapestries’ and going into detail about the ‘fabric’ of numerous compositions – and that was before I listened to the album.

The pieces are built on interesting juxtapositions – sparse motoric beats click metronomically through gloopy synth basslines that could have been lifted off early 80s electro cuts on Wax Trax! while xylophone-type chimes ring out lilting motifs. Extraneous sounds are looped to forge unusual rhythms, and there’s a muddy, murky aspect to the sound that makes it difficult to separate the different elements.

Many of the synth sounds are vintage in style, squelchy, thick, fuzzy-edged, and while the arrangements are sparse, the effect is far from minimalist: there’s quite some density to the sound, and what’s more, a lot of Ratoratiyo pursues quite danceable grooves, and with a hybrid of 90s minimalism and 80s robotix, it feels completely removed from anything human.

‘Logic by Machine’ contains human voices – sampled, distanced, detached – against a sparse, rhythmic loop. It’s anything but comforting, and leaves one feeling even further adrift, alienated. It’s a strange experience that twists at the cognitive filters in unexpected ways. After all, none of the elements are new or particularly unusual – but their assemblage is, and in ways that are difficult to place a finger on. And it’s that difficulty of placement that lies at the heart of the challenge for a listener. You ask yourself ‘how does this fit with my experience?’ and ‘where do I belong in all of this?’ There are no handholds or footholds in terms of emotional resonance, in terms of experience. And precisely what does this convey? The sounds may be warm, but the experience is somehow cold, with a sense of separation.

It’s from this place of distance, a position of removal, isolation, that we begin to explore the spaces of Ratoratiyo, and the exploratory adventure begins.

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Latenight Honeymoon – The Causeway

Posted: 13 December 2020 in Singles and EPs
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11th of December 2020

Christopher Nosnibor

Lifted from their Codependency D.S.T. EP, ‘The Causeway’ for no obvious or specific reason evokes the experience of reading Lee Rourke’s debut novel, Vulgar Things, which is set on Canvey Island in Essex. It may be in the Thames estuary, but it’s not connected to the mainland by a causeway – at least not since 1931. Although inspired by the street on which a pub in London frontman Ted Joyce stumbled upon and had been about to frequent before discovering it was boarded up due to COVID restrictions, ‘The Causeway’ in some way reminds us of the ways in which we’re all cut off and isolated, and how we’re all subject to – and dictated to – by the ebbs and flows not just of tides, or time, but of life, and of moods, ours and those of others.

The lyrics are a stream of consciousness unfolding, the tune is a colossal hybrid of indie, alt-rock, post-punk and funk. The fat, strolling bass is the focal point and bounces a groove that owes a debt to The Cure in their poppier moments (and coupled with the buoyant lead line in the bridge, if they weren’t listening to ‘Hot, Hot, Hot!!!’ around the time of writing, then it only goes to prove that influence is transmitted through the ether and spreads like a rhizome in the subconscious) before cutting hard left into a driving chorus that’s got indie anthem stamped all over it.

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