This is jaw-dropping stuff. It’s a kind of deconstruction of a sound clash, with dub and reggae and dancehall stripped down to the bare metal and refined and processed and expanded and transmogrified into something totally awesome. The result is a big, splendid, monster, all bass-bin-bothering round the bottom and glitches on top. Some of it is sort-of-ambient, in an “I’m lost in a giant metal machine and there’s a broken radio playing a dodgy pirate station somewhere in the distance” way. Much of it is actually kind of jumping, though, albeit more in an “I’m just going to lie here and twitch gently” way than an “I must leap up and shake my booty” way. (I dunno, maybe System I might actually get me moving, if only for its ravey little synth melody which sounds like an echo of Sheffield in 1991.) If I had to compare it to anything, I guess it would be I-LP-O In Dub’s Communist Dub, but even that’s a stretch. (By coincidence, Ilpo Väisänen released a follow-up to that, Capital Dub, Chapter 1, around the same time as this came out. I have to admit I was slightly disappointed by Capital, which didn’t appear to be doing anything very new. Perhaps I was spoilt by having heard this already.) This album is overflowing with ideas and innovation (despite its 76 minute length) and superbly executed: I must have listened to it a dozen times by now, and there are still moments which make me catch my breath each time.
I bought this from Boomkat. They call it Techno / House.
dogrando writes about some records 