Perhaps the
main problem for poststep, the main reason it isn't recognised as the
uncontrolled eruption of revolutionary musical modernism that it is, is that
it's erupting at a time where countless retromanic eruptions are happening
simultaneously, and where everybody seem to be doing everything, all styles,
all the time. No matter how incredible and groundbreaking poststep is, it's
hard work noticing it in this ocean of stuff, and even harder when it's using
the same online underground networks as everybody else, where everything is available
and considered equally interesting, and no larger, deeper impact is allowed to
be made outside of the music nerd circles. There's countless “electronic
releases”, collections of files “released” by virtual labels, as well endless
amounts of music to be found on sites like Soundcloud and Bandcamp, even
endless amounts of music in different poststep styles, and very much of this is
pretty good, quite a bit of it is even great, but in the end, who has the time
to listen to it all – let alone more than once! How to choose? How to ever get
a relationship with any of it?
Now,
there's no doubt that a lot of the really massive stylistic innovations are
being made within these online communities, and that if you ever had the time
to check it all, you might find the greatest, most unbelievable and
futuristically potent music right now, lurking in those bottomless depths. But
in the end, developing a lasting relationship with anything in that ever
morphing audiomaze seem impossible, you're always on the move, always checking
new stuff. Perhaps this is why, even though the frontline seems to be the
online communities, records are still released – and lots of them, even! Of
course, releasing records doesn't magically create an impact in the world
outside the underground subcultural circels. The fact that Dam Mantels Purple Arrow made it to vinyl did not make it noticed by a generation, it didn't make
it the kind of unavoidable Unknown Pleasures-like milestone that it should have
been. There's certainly a sense in which the physical records are pretty much
preaching to the converted: Mostly they're pressed in extremely limited numbers
– less than 500, perhaps only 200 most of the time – and sold exclusively to
those already down with the programme. If we only consider the records, the
musical revolutions captured on them are only heard by an extremely small elite
– for some of them just a couple of hundred people worldwide – those dedicated
to the cause and ready to put both time and money into it.
At this point it's worth noticing a couple of
things: 1) Even though the records are pressed in such small numbers, it
doesn't necessarily say anything about how “unheard” this music is overall,
since so much of its audience is in the purely digital domain. 2) Even if it is
unheard, it doesn't mean that it isn't as innovative or groundbreaking modern
as, say, the big post punk names. Huge parts of post punk were these small
do-it-yourself communities of dysfunctionally radical experiments, and with
poststep, that's simply how the major part of the scene works. The circles
where this stuff makes an impact are small, but it doesn't mean that the
impacts themselves, regarding the depth of inventiveness and originality, are
small. There's this line of thinking within music (rock?) criticism, where
socio-cultural resonance is considered the main parameter of importance – or
rather, where a lack of socio-cultural resonance is seen as a criterion for
deeming music irrelevant. I've always considered that line of thinking
extremely dull and inhibiting. It's wonderful when really great stuff also seem
to have a huge socio-cultural impact, but just because wilful obscurity and
lack of commercial success doesn't equate art or brilliance, it doesn't mean
that the reverse is automatically the case. And really; if we were to judge,
say, Pere Ubu, This Heat or The Contortions in terms of socio-cultural impact,
we could pretty much discard them right away. They might have had a slightly
larger impact than most current underground poststep artists, but they're still
wilfully obscure underground avant-gardists, and today pretty much unknown to
all but a small elite of post punk scholars. Their greatness came from their
bloody minded and elitist drive to completely dismantle musical structures – to
move forwards into even more expressive fields in David Thomas words. The same
thing is going on with the best of poststep, and that is definitely “enough” to
make it awe inspiring – and worth our attention.
Anyway, to
get back on track: You might feel inclined to ask why they even bother
releasing vinyl when there's so few who'll know - or care - about it – let
alone buy it. I think most of these microlabels are happy if they just break
even, and they seem like basically vanity projects, which I actually think is
sort of right, in a sense, though there’s much more substance to it than just
“vanity”. I think the whole reason lies precisely in the insubstantiality and incomprehensibility
of the digital storage networks. It might not necessarily be a conscious
reasoning, but nevertheless it's almost like a direct attempt to give the music
an element of longevity, of recognisable substance – proving that it exist by
incarnating it in physical form. For a long time, the continued existence of
vinyl – at least in the electronic department – was considered a DJ-thing. It
was made because DJs bought it, used it and wanted it. This is hardly the case
anymore – the number of DJ using vinyl seems dwindling, and is mostly
concentrated around particularly minimal/functional styles where the whole
point is to see a DJ manipulate DJ tools that are pretty uninteresting in
themselves. Even though the poststep vinyl is pressed in extremely small
numbers, I really doubt that they're all bought by DJs (I, at least, am not a
DJ, and I buy a lot of them). How many DJs even play that these styles?
So, while vinyl is becoming more and more
irrelevant as a part of DJing, it's nevertheless still being made, even with a
style like poststep, that doesn't seem to have much use for it, being mostly an
online community, and much less DJ-centered than dubstep proper – or techno or
house for that matter. Of course, there's
also the audiophile argument, and I'm sure that's part of it for many buyers as
well, but it seems to me that it's more of an afterthought – after all, no one
under thirty is really an audiophile nowadays; it's not like the poststep
audience isn't using the online networks as the prime source. Vinyl must have
more to offer than just supposedly superior sound quality to still be around.
Rather, it's a way of showing that this stuff – considered unfocused and
aimless dabbling by the larger (rock-centered or retromania-informed) critical
narrative – is not just that; that it's felt and created to be important, to
mean something. That it's worth using both money (when music is otherwise
considered free) and, perhaps even more significant, time on it (self releasing
records is a lot of cumbersome work and trouble). Of course, this does not make
it important or world shattering in itself (just like self released post punk
records weren't necessarily great just by the effort put into self releasing
them), but it does show that these people think and care more about their music
than they're supposed to by the overall hyperstasis-narrative, and certainly
more than they have to if that narrative was 100% right.
One of the
greatest things about the continued vinyl presence in poststep is that the
records being made are increasingly leaving the dull 12” format – which
dominated dubstep proper (as it did with grime and 2step and jungle and most
other functionalist dance forms) – behind. This is in itself a strong indication
that the records aren't just made for the DJs, who are usually supposed to be
the ones who want the widest, loudest grooves, but more importantly, it's sort
of reinventing the EP as a powerful medium in its own right. There have been
times before where most of the interesting action was happening on EPs,
especially the early days of rave, where few managed to actually release albums
(and rarely made anything good when they did), and EPs made it possible to
nevertheless release records that could be heard as a whole, with room for
variety and experiments. And right now, we're not only living in the richest,
most overwhelming time since the early nineties when it comes to music overall,
we're also living in an incredible golden age of the EP format. I don't think
its potential have ever been used so brilliantly before.
A very
practical thing about the EP format is that it allows producers to make
extended and integrated collections of tracks without falling into the many traps
that the album represent when it comes to electronic dance music. As it's well
known, there's a long history of techno/rave/trance/house/etc.-artists failing
miserably when tackling the challenge to make albums. Partly, this was because an
album was seen as a “challenge” at all, rather than just a collection of good
tracks. For some reason albums were suddenly considered something that had to
be “grand statements”, or had to cover all bases (a little ambient, a little
jungle, a little acid etc., all of it stylistic exercises), or had to have huge
crossover appeal (endless guests and pointless vocalists). It was never really
explained why this had to be, but eventually it became sort of a self
fulfilling prophecy, everybody talking about how rave genres wasn't really
album music, making it seem practically impossible to succeed without some sort
of Gordian-knot-solving. But with EPs that problem isn't really there anymore,
nobody expects an EP to be the Sergeant Peppers of post dubstep, or to have
guest vocals from every trendy indie singer who wants to seem relevant.
Personally,
even though it's obvious that “the album” have always been something rave
styles have had trouble with, I've never bought the idea that rave music is by
definition not album music. The trouble with rave-albums have other roots, one
of them clearly being that major labels (or the artists themselves?) didn't
really think instrumental albums would sell to a sufficiently large audience,
and hence the guest star plague started. But I think an equally disastrous element
simply was the time rave music happened to break through – i.e. when CDs were
thought to be the future, or at the very least the future of albums. Of course,
ever since the late sixties, “the album” had already been redefined as
something increasingly “important”, but with the CD it didn't just have to be
some sort of integrated whole, it also had to be bloody long, and even more so
when the inflated length and the amount of extra stuff was pushed as a reason
to eventually give up on vinyl and go all CD. This almost automatically made
albums from the early nineties and onwards worse than albums from the previous
decades, not because the quality of the music as such had diminished (au
contraire, IMO), but simply because they – even when they didn't fall into the
aforementioned traps – simply were longer than they had to be, and often
contained some filler material that previous generations wouldn't have needed
to include.
There's
obviously no need to think of albums in these terms anymore, now that we're
living in an age where the CD seems to be on the way to the dustbin of history,
and “albums” are becoming just clusters of tracks that are not fettered by the
limitations of physical media. Nevertheless, the mindset sort of remains,
releasing an album is still seen as some sort of event, and this is why EPs are
so refreshing, and where the most amazing stuff is happening. It's worth
noticing that back in the fifties and sixties, albums were short. So short,
actually, that they'd hardly count as albums now – often closer to 30 than 40
minutes. And now, EPs are sort of moving towards the same format, but from the
opposite direction. To begin with, most poststep was still 12” territory, EPs
were rarely longer than four tracks, and a lot of them had the incredibly
annoying three track format popular in a lot of dubstep. But now, six or seven
tracks are not unusual, often with playing times of more than 25 minutes, and full
picture sleeves are more and more common (in itself showing the level of
dedication to the physical media – usually you'll have to press at least 500
records to get a picture sleeve, otherwise you'll have to come up with some
creative (and time consuming) way to have it made). All this is effectively
making these EPs mini albums rather than singles with some additional filler
tracks, and certainly, they're very often clearly meant to be heard that way as
well.
Personally
I think it would be wonderful if this development eventually would make the
poststep producers completely ditch not just the faulty “grand
statement”/crossover-understanding of albums, but also the stupid “DJ friendly”
vinyl formats (albums as double/triple EPs/12”s), and expand the EPs to actual
small (and affordable) albums - LPs, really, rather than “albums” as they've been
defined by the CD. To some degree this is actually already happening – labels
like Keysound and Time No Place seem to be thinking in LPs this way, as is much
of the skweee scene. And Planet MU released at least some of their newer albums
(Kuedo, Last Step, Ital Tek) as LPs rather than double EPs. Still, though, it
doesn't yet seem like a step people are ready to take (or perhaps have
considered taking at all), so all the more reason to praise the EPs, small
wonders in their own right as many of them are, and released in staggering
amount throughout these last couple of years.
In you want
to know where the crucial poststep is happening you'll have to follow the EPs.
For a start, there’s something like four or five labels really leading the way,
followed by a cluster of more uneven ones. Forget Hotflush and Hessle Audio and
Skull Disco and (yikes) Apple Pips and all those labels – they were the boring
part of poststep to begin with, and they certainly haven't become more relevant
recently. Hyperdub have not completely lost it, I guess, but they're also
moving in directions which – interesting as they sometimes are – are only
tangentially related to the exiting things going on right now. No, the holy
trinity – poststeps Moving Shadow/Suburban Base/Reinforced (as misleading as
that comparison is in many ways) – is Rwina, Lowriders Recordings and DonkyPitch. Slowly, these three have moved from being upstart outsiders to being the
most consistently amazing sources of poststep in 2011-2012. Right now Rwina is
the absolute powerhouse, and my theory is that it has a lot to do with the fact
that it started as a more rave-oriented dubstep outlet, fusing playful wobble
with wonky structures and 8 bit weirdness. This bitstep element is still a part
of the overall Rwina profile, but recently they've gone in all sort of bizarre
directions, branching out to wider trends in the overall poststep scene
(mangled footwork and trap deconstructions, ghostly soundscapes) as well as
housing some of the strangest and most astoundingly unique names right now.
The two
greatest releases of 2012 were two Rwina EPs: Jameszoos Faaveelaa and
Krampfhafts First Threshold. I was extremely sceptical about Faaveelaa to begin
with, the title seemed to suggest MIA-ish ghetto beat tourism in full effect,
but I was pleasantly surprised - utterly amazed, actually - by some of the most
bizarre, dysfunctional beat contraptions I’ve ever heard, wonderfully free from
any kind of attempted street level authenticity or borrowed exoticism. Rather,
Jameszoo takes the poststep hallmark of stumbling, lopsided beats and dizzy,
hypersynthetic sounds to hitherto unheard, near nauseous extremes. Every bit as
bizarre and absurd and absolutely new as anything poststep has come up with
before. As for Krampfhaft, he’s basically just going a step further from his
great Making Magic EP from last year, creating an even more otherworldly
amalgam of warm cosmic drifts and febrile hyper-bubbling riffs. On “Cork”, “Twin
Prime” and “In a Dream” he turns the icy minimal stutter-structures of Anti-G’s
awesome avant bubbling style into baroque maximalism, while “Marram” and
“Bones” are sort of futuristic torch songs, all inorganically shiny alien
surfaces, yet oddly touching.
Krapfhaft
and Jameszoo were the best of Rwinas offerings this year, but their other
releases were also pretty great. Desto has been a part of poststep almost from
the very beginning, but 2012s No Sleep was his best so far, all cascading
bitstep ballads with roots in the Zomby-aesthetic, but also expanding it in
directions Zomby never really explored. The opposite approach is found on Defts
Masquerade, which is pretty much drawing from all over the hipster beats map
(much like I feared Jameszoo would do), with elements of footwork, trap and
funky, but he still somehow managed to make them all work together as a
polymorphous hybrid rather than a forced show of eclecticism. The amalgam of
trap/footwork and the general poststep aesthetic (queasy, dizzy-dreamy
soundscapes, rhythmic non-linearity) was by far the biggest trend in poststep
this year, and as such Deft was probably the one instance where Rwina seemed to
do the same as everybody else, rather than changing the rules - even if Deft
was one of the better examples of this trend (which, in itself, and rather surprisingly,
actually produced much better and much more original music than it, on paper,
looked like it ever should have).
Hot on the
heels of Rwina were Donky Pitch and (especially) Lowriders Recordings, two
labels that practically started the same way: Each started in 2010 with an EP
by Ghost Mutt in some combination (split/remix) with Slugabed, showcasing the
2010 bitstep sound at its best. However, Lowriders have since spread out to a
wide variety of poststep styles, all while becoming more ambitious with the
formats (longer and longer EPs, picture covers, even cassettes). Donky Pitch,
on the other hand, are sticking with simple white cardboard sleeves, as well as
a stylistic combination of Rustie-ish para-electroid bombast and melancholy
downtempo bitstep. Rusties Glass Swords album was the most dominant force in
the beginning of 2012 - before the footwork mania broke through - and I think
it’s great that Donky Pitch made room for those who wanted to go on exploring
the potential of that sound, twist it into much stranger, almost unrecognizable
shapes - such as Keyboard Kid 206 on The Transition or The Range on Disk -
rather than follow the newest fad. And the last Donky Pitch release of 2012,
Arp 101 and Elliott Yorkes Fluro Black, showed that the bitstep madness from
just two years ago can still sound fresh.
With
Lowriders, going in all sort of directions meant that not everything was
equally successful, but they did come up with some brilliant releases, such as
Halps Tic Tac Toe (containing some of the same dutch madness as Krampfhaft and
Jameszoo, but combined with some of the slightly more “conventional”
Rustie/footwork-inspired elements), Alephs Fourteen Dreams per Night (intricately convoluted beats, glittering bleepscapes, ghostly hollow atmospheres),
and especially Doshys Electrophilic, somehow twisting incredibly rigid and
minimal beat structures into something ridiculously slinky and bombastic.
Strands Slam Funk! was more problematic - it did contain a couple of wonderfully
raw bitstep gems, but sadly also some cringeworthy electro funk-pastiches.
Equally uneven was the compilation EP Power Shuffles vol.1, an early attempt to
chart the growing footwork fever. Now there’s definitely some amazing examples
of footwork insanity taken-one-step-further on it (in particular Leatherfaces
“Watch Me Do My Thang” and Motëms “Work”), but also some rather pointless
stylistic exercises, and several tracks that are basically run-of-the-mill IDM
with slightly jittery beats underneath.
Almost up
there with Rwina, Donky Pitch and Lowriders was Civil Music. Though they’ve
released as much good music recently as at least the last two, this highly
prolific label is also a bit too diverse - stylistically as well as
quality-wise. Artists like Darling Farah (minimal dub techno), Kotchy
(oldschool downtempo beatscapes) and Brassica (retro disco) seems to place
Civil Music among the retromanic “we-like-anything-as-long-as-it’s-good”
electronic labels, and some of their best know poststep acts (Drums of Death,
Om Unit) are rarely that interesting or original. However, they also released
great EPs like Xliis twisted rave-step kaleidoscope Neon High, or Pixelord and
Kuhns Supaplex and Kings, swirling reinterpretations of footwork as cosmic
clockwork contraptions. I’d say both Pixelord and Kuhn were better and much
more fascinating before they decided jump the work-wagon, but they do also show
what can be done with the style without losing its sense of urgency, or
resorting to pastiche. All that said, Civil Music actually made their greatest
contribution to poststep this year through albums, but more about them
later.
Completing
the top 5 of poststep labels we have Error Broadcast. They started out mostly
as a downtempo label, but with a good sense of the “post hop” end of that scene,
i.e. the end that also sort of belong to the overall poststep mess (they
released Shlohmos debut EP Shlo-Fi, for example). Since then they’ve spread out
extremely far, and not always in equally successful directions (i.e. more
housey things like B-Ju), but all the same they sometimes come up with totally
unexpected, almost indescribable records. This year it was Montgomery Clunks
Mondegreen EP, which was just the kind of constantly morphing,
dis-and-reintegrating freak-neo-rave that Hudson Mohawke would love to make,
but is far too self consciously clever-ironic to come up with. Pretty great was
also OLs Body Varial, which managed to fuse frantic footwork beats with
hollow-eyed, almost burialesque slow mo-atmospherics in a way that made it seem
like they’d never been apart to begin with.
The top 5 is
only the tip of the EP iceberg of course; in 2012 there also came lot of great
EPs from many other places - whether it was new labels yet too small and
sporadic to seem really established, or relatively big labels from completely
different areas opening up to poststep - far too many to mention in detail. A
couple of personal favourites include the complex, sprawling neon-doomstep of
Bit-Tuners Signals (Hula Honeys), the muffled dream-juke of Howses Lay Hollow
(Tri Angle), and The-Drums Heavy Liquid (Audraglint), a hallucinatory maze of
vocal fragments, slow motion beats and gloopy melodies, sort of recreating the feel
that made Burial so great, but from a completely different starting point, and
as a result sounding very different. You could say that The-Drum is the
greatest so far coming from the American micro-continuum that also include the likes
of Kingdom, Egyptrixx and Nguzunguzu - the last of which released no less than
two great EPs this year: Warm Pulse (Hippos in Tanks) and Mirage (Time No
Place) - though the last is actually a physical rerelease of a digital release
from 2010 (there’s the vinyl idealism again). Miage is one of those rare
examples of how inventive and weird house-leaning poststep actually can be,
while Warm Pulse is going into even more abstract and ethereal territories,
somewhat reminiscent of Fatima Al Qadiri or a less abrasive Jam City.
In addition
to the favourites, some further honorary mentions: Computer Jays Savage Planet Discotheque vol.1 (Weirds Science) as probably the best and most forward
thinking 2012-example of Californian sci fi post hop (the Flying Lotus, Free
the Robots etc. tradition), the ellipsoid ethno-step of Fresh Touchs The Ethiopian (Angular), Pixelord doing what he does best - stumbling somnambulist
bitstep - on Keramika (Hit and Hope),
and Hudson Mohawke X Lunices TNGHT (Warp), which is actually quite good
even if it isn’t as great as it has been hyped up to be, let alone compared to
what other people have done in this area in 2012 (i.e. Montgomery Clunk and
several of the Rwina/Donky Pitch/Lowriders-acts). There’s still a scene for
experimental, complex grime (what I called “hypergrime”), and this is also an
EP-thing (when it gets physical release at all), some of the best examples this
year being Slackks highly unorthodox Raw Missions (Local Action), as well as
Noaipres complex, but sadly much less noticed Noaipre (Ho Tep). And then there
was the skweee scene, back in full effect in 2012 after a slightly inactive
2011. Here six track EPs/mini-LPs was where the most interesting things came
out, either by scene veterans like Daniel Savio and Mesak (Valiant and
Holtiton, both on Laton), or relative newcomers like Lazercrotch (Lazercrotch on Poisonous Gases) or Yöt (Bitch Bender on Raha & Tunteet). Oh, and Burial
released his best since Untrue, the 30 minute EP/mini LP Kindred.
Now, I
didn’t really plan for this piece to be a “best of 2012-thing”, but I guess the
way it’s gotten out of hand, and the fact that the year is over by now, means
that it’s become one nevertheless. Hence, and even though my main point is that
the EPs are the ones to get first and foremost, I suppose I should get into the
albums as well. Because in 2012 there was also released more poststep albums
than ever before. As mentioned earlier, “the album” still represents a problem
to most poststep producers, and as a result, most of the ones that were made
this year weren’t quite as good as the EPs that preceded them. This was especially
the case with four highly anticipated - at least by me - debuts, all of which
disappointed, albeit to very different degrees: Slugabeds Time Team (Ninja
Tune), Dam Mantles Brothers Fowl (Notown), Eproms Metahuman (Rwina), and
Debruits From the Horizon (Civil Music).
It
shouldn't be surprising that I had unreasonably high expectations for Slugabeds
debut album; after all, it was pretty much his Ultra Heat Treated EP that
finally woke me up to just how world shattering a force poststep was, and could be. That said, given that the two EPs preceding it, after he went from Planet
MU to Ninja Tune, both showed a mellowing of his style, towards an altogether
more warm and welcoming sound, I was prepared that Time Team probably wouldn't
be the further development from Ultra heat Treated that I had hoped for. Still,
it could have had at least some tracks developing his more harsh, splintered
and far-out side. It hadn't. The wildest and most fractured track was the title
track from his first Ninja Tune EP, Moonbeam Rider. So yeah, I was massively
disappointed when hearing the first clips, I even considered not buying it at
all. Eventually I gave in, though, and I'm glad I did, because even though
there's a lot of irritation things about it, and even though it's nowhere nearly
as good as it could have been – not even as good as it at least should have
been, as a showcase for a softer, more relaxed Slugabed – it's nevertheless
still a great, deeply original album, mostly not sounding like anything ever
made before. But it takes some time getting into.
My eventual
approach, my excuse (to myself) for buying it after all, was yet another
comparison with the post punk period. I wasn't old enough to care much about
music during the post punk years, and consequently I've come to many of the
records somewhat higgledy piggledy, or even “backwards”. The first record I
heard by Pere Ubu was Song of the Bailing Man, the first by Ultravox was
Vienna, and the first by Tuxedomoon was Ship of Fools. Heck, for a long time I
only knew the reformed Wire of the late eighties. And I loved those records,
and still do as a matter of fact. As probably the only person in the world I
like Song of the Bailing Man as much as Modern Dance and Dub Housing, or Ship of Fools as much as Half Mute (though the Foxx-era Ultravox rules supreme,
obviously). However, had I discovered the music in real time, blown away by
Modern Dance and Half Mute as they were released, I would most likely have felt
the same sort of disappointment that a lot of post punkers apparently (and to
me, bizarrely) felt with Song of the Bailing Man (I don't really know how
people felt about the later Tuxedomoon, but clearly, a “mellowing” had happened
there as well). And even though I prefer the early Ultravox, I’m still thrilled
by most of Vienna, in a way I perhaps wouldn't be had I been betrayed by them
“going commercial” in real time. Well, you could say that Slugabed is both
going in the direction of Song of the Bailing Man with Time Team – a lighter,
more quirky/absurdist sound – as well as “going commercial” to the degree that
it is possible within this style: closer to the stoned down tempo grooves
preferred by most Ninja Tune fans (I suppose), and even an electro house-ish
single (“Sex”, perhaps his least original and interesting track ever).
Had I heard
Time Team first, on its own terms, might I not have grown to love it in much
the same way as Song of the Bailing Man, even though I subsequently discovered
the real, revolutionary deal? I'll never know, but even though I doubt that Time Team would ever had felt as great to me – it has quite a lot of flaws that The Bailing Man doesn't – it definitely has a unique and wonderful charm all its
own, and manages to turn the terrifyingly fractured pixel topologies of his
earlier tracks into gentler, more dreamy-disoriented shapes. Most of the time,
anyway. Because, as I said, it does indeed have some problems, and they mostly
come from Time Teams particular format, i.e. from his trying to come to terms
with “the album”. First of all, it is, paradoxically, a shame that the album is
released by Ninja Tune, because that's a label specializing in extravagant
luxury packages appealing to vinyl-philes. Meaning, in this case, that the
vinyl version is a triple EP, with two discs containing the actual album and an
extra one of bonus material – much of which is actually better than several of
the “official” tracks.
In any
case, the consequence is that the album is a huge, heavy and pretty clumsy
object, practically demanding to be a colossal work of art. But as it's usually
the case with those records, it just means that it's too long, with its triple
format getting annoying and unnecessary rather than luxurious or awe inspiring.
Not least because of its second problem: There's a couple of not so great
tracks – in particular “Unicorn Suplex” and the aforementioned “Sex”, where
Slugabed seem pretty ordinary, without the weird structures that makes even his
more laid back music strange and fascinating. In addition to that, there's two
tracks from previous EPs, which didn't really need to be included, so all in
all, the album could easily been trimmed down to an EP/mini-LP, OR it could
have contained the best – if not all – of the bonus tracks without having to
put them on a separate disc. Heck, I'd say all the best could be distilled on a
single LP, compact and straightforward, and as light as his new direction
suggests, and it would have been a killer, without a single superfluous second, and definitely the best
album of the year – because when he's really good, his new style is still that
good. Ah well. Time Team is still a brilliant album, it has this sunny,
lightheaded feel that makes his asymmetrical beats and fractal pixel-webs seem
as warm and soothing as they seemed hostile and disorienting before. And tracks
like “New Worlds”, “Mountains Come out of the Sky”, “Climbing a Tree” and “Make
a Wish” are quite simply astonishing, beautiful. So yeah, as much as it
disappointed me and wasn't what it should have been, we're still talking of one
of the very best albums of 2012 (perhaps the second best).
Much more
problematic is Dam Mantles Brothers Fowl. Here I was practically as excited as
with Time Team, and perhaps even more so, given that Dam Mantles EPs have been
consistently great. Perhaps his last before the album wasn’t quite as
mindblowing as his first two, but almost nothing could be, and it was certainly
amazing by anybody else’s standards – merciless forbidding and sorrowful
ghoststep, as deeply moving as the best of Burial, yet pretty much unlike
anything else on the poststep scene. How did he go from that to the cosy
feel-good-melancholia of Brothers Fowl, not really substantially different from
most by-the-numbers downtempo out there? Again I bought it, with pretty much
the same excuses as with Time Team, but this time it didn't really help, and
even though Brothers Fowl is perfectly listenable, it never clicked or seemed
remotely relevant. Here, later Tuxedomoom would definitely be the most obvious
comparison, given the jazzy elements and overall smooth, “sophisticated” sound.
Or perhaps The Raincoats Moving, which I (probably even more alone in this than
with Pere Ubu) actually think is their best, (slightly ahead of Odyshape and
much better than the first), period. After all, Moving is jazzy, slightly “backwards
looking” (it's basically folk-inflicted canterbury-prog, innit), smooth and
full sounding – just like Brothers Fowl.
But it
doesn't work: Both the Tuxedomoon of Ship of Fools and You, and The Raincoats
of Moving, still had deeply original ideas, and even though Brothers Fowl do
use a few synthetic sounds and abruptly arranged samples, it’s all made to fit
discretely and tastefully into the overall mood of slick, harmless
“sophistication”. In other words; the few original elements it does contain are
ironed out, nothing seems strange or unexpected. And even that could perhaps be
acceptable if only the actual compositions were better; after all, the final
step elevating Moving to be the masterpiece that it is, is the incredible
uniqueness and quality of its songs, and Dam Mantle have certainly shown
himself more than capable in that direction, with amazing tracks like “Grey”,
“Two Women” and “Not a Word”. On Brothers Fowl, however, the tracks are just
too goddamn polite and anonymous to make any lasting impression. Sure, as
mentioned before, it’s a listenable album, I can listen to it on its own terms
and it seems OK - as downtempo goes, you might even say it’s one of the better
offerings - but I’d never have heard it several times, or have bought it, or taken
any time to think about it, if it wasn’t for those EPs that preceded it.
With
Debruits
From the Horizon, you could once again say that a sort of mellowing
out had happened, but this time it was not as much towards a more smooth and
laid back sound, but rather towards a more
organic and
human sound, with less
of the insane, hyper-angular syncopations that made his previous music so
fascinating, so shockingly
new. Instead, the album was much more based on a
traditional afro/ethno-funk aesthetic (including lots of talkbox), and contained
much more fluid, straightforward rhythms, anchored by African samples that more
or less created the entire structure of the tracks, rather than being cut into
sharp blasts of ethno weirdness as on previous Debruit EPs. So once again not
the blast it should have been, though in all fairness it’s still a really weird
and original album - especially the last half -, and in many ways as brilliant
and unique a reimagining of ethno-funk as many post punkers with similar
inspirations.
My
disappointment with Eproms Metahuman is perhaps a little surprising, given that
I’ve never quite followed him with the same interest as many other
poststeppers. Not that his EPs weren’t good - they’re excellent examples of the
wobbly end of bitstep - it’s just that many other producers seemed more crucial
in that respect (Slugabed most of all, of course). However, I heard that
Metahuman was on its way exactly while I was still really disappointed with
Time Team, and I guess I sort of hoped that Eprom - who often seemed more raw
and brutal (if not quite as far out) than Slugabed - would do things right, and
make the uncompromised bitstep masterpiece that Time Team wasn’t. It didn’t
quite happen that way, and it’s also a pretty unfair way to meet the album. In
many ways, Metahuman is a brilliant album, and if I forget my personal
expectations it’s certainly close to being one of the best. And when it doesn’t
quite make it, it’s once again exactly because it tries so hard to be “the
album”. Eprom wants to show us that he’s both capable of twisted, bleepy
harsh-step (“Prototype”, “The Golden Planet”, “Needle Trasher”) as well as moody
sci fi atmospherics (“Honey Badger”, “Floating Palace”, “Raytracing”), and
that’s all right, he is capable, and comes up with some awesome takes on both.
What he doesn’t quite manage, unfortunately, is to turn this into a much longer
and more coherent package, i.e. “the album”. Metahuman is coherent all right,
but it’s primarily because it’s pretty samey-sounding most of the time. “Tunes”
have never been Eproms strong side, what makes his music memorable is the
formal inventions - sound and structures - and he doesn’t seem to have had
enough ideas in that department to fill a full 45 minutes. I wouldn’t say that
there are tracks on Metahuman that are bad as such, but several of them seem a
bit anonymous/filler-ish, and a “mini album” approach could have worked wonders.
I’d still say it’s among the ten best albums of 2012, but as with Time Team, a
more sharp format would have made it a candidate for the very best.
And what,
then, was, the best album of 2012? To my surprise that happened to be Starkeys
Orbits (Civil Music), which came out not much more than a month ago. His 2008 debut
album, Ephemereal Exhibits, was quite good, but suffered a bit from the same
kind of “samey-ness” as Metahuman, and the follow up Ear Drums and Black Holes
seemed like the typical attempt to simultaneously cover all bases and make
cross over pop, resulting in the equally typical overlong mess. Subsequent EPs
also contained an annoying mix of ace hypergrime and bitstep on the one hand,
and lame indetronica on the other, and as a result I’d pretty much written him
off. Hence my surprise, for what a return to form Orbits is, totally getting it
right where both Ephemereal Exhibits and Metahuman didn’t. It oscillates
between soft/atmospheric and hard/ravey - often within single tracks - and he’s
got exactly the wealth of ideas, futuristic originality and melodic depth
necessary to make that simple dichotomy work for 55 minutes. It’s also interesting
that he’s only very sparsely using either 8 bit elements or the collapsing
rhythmic structures that makes most ravey/wobbly bitstep so insane, instead he
seems to use grime as a starting point, taking the bizarre, angular
fanfare-riffs and inorganic syncopations far into the hysterical - often almost
getting close to Krampfhafts psycho-bubbling sound. A huge part of Orbits is
simply everything I could ever have hoped “hypergrime” would turn into, but in
addition to that, the more “cosmic” tracks approach the sci fi synth-aesthetic in
a way that works just as brilliantly as, say, Kuedo, and yet is Starkeys very
own. Orbits is thrillingly futuristic in both vision and execution.
As for other great albums this year, it’s worth
mentioning a couple of debuts that were positive surprises, though mostly
because I didn’t have great expectations for them to begin with: Jam City have
always been one of the better Night Slugs-acts, but that’s not saying that much
in my book, and I haven’t been particular overwhelmed by him. However, with
Classical Curves he completely abandoned the house vestiges and explored an
unapologetically inorganic, “vibeless” soundworld - and was all the better for
it! It was all shiny, slick, synthetic surfaces, and in that way you could
probably say that there was some small relation to Rusties maximalist sound,
but where Rustie is often silly, colourful and hysterical, Jam City was cold
and empty, with an almost ballardian twist. Not exactly music that “touches”
you, but it was nevertheless deeply fascinating, and perhaps the strangest
album this year.
Another
artist that never quite impressed me before was Distal, but with Civilization
(Tectonic) he made one of 2012 most convincing footwork-based (and trap-based
too I guess) poststep offerings. It was probably a bit too long and uneven
(“the album” again), and sometimes the use of “authentic”-sounding “ghetto”
vocal samples got annoyingly close to parody/pastiche, but mostly it was brilliant
exactly because it didn't try to be wild, raw, street-real dancefloor music.
Rather, it took the element of abstraction within those styles and ran with them,
turned them into increasingly bizarre shapes. Rather than just sprinkling some footwork
over a stale IDM-dish to spice it up, Distal, when he’s best, dissects the
sound completely, and then reassemble it in ways that doesn’t really sound like
anything else around.
If
Civilization came up with some of the most refreshingly strange footwork
deformations this year, but just didn’t work equally well all the time, the
most consistent deconstruction of the style was probably Ital Teks Nebula Dance (Planet MU), which was in many ways an heir to Kuedos Severant: Panoramic and
bittersweet synth music made strangely unstable by alien rhythms. Nebula Dance
had a bit more going on in the beat department, the tracks were often extremely
dizzy and jittery, but on the other hand, the melodies were rarely memorable -
an old Ital Tek problem, which also means that it was a good move to make this
album substantially shorter and more focused than the previous one. You could
argue that it’s still close to simply being too nice and smooth, with all
sounds blending in endless digital reverb, but in the end it works, perhaps
because the way it manages to incorporate the footwork rhythms seems so
obvious; the end result doesn’t really sound like footwork at all, or like some
other style superficially decorated by footwork, it’s its own, fully integrated
thing.
The more
club-tinged part of poststep - the area where things have become more and more
house/funky-oriented lately -, actually also delivered a couple of surprisingly
good albums: San Gabriels Wolfe (Time No Place) was almost like a colourful
party version of Nguzunguzu (though some parts were a bit too “funny” for their
own good), while Dusk+Blackdowns Dasaflex (Keysound), despite a couple of
tracks suffering from some of the most cringeworthy funky clichés around, also
managed to fuse elements of grime and funky in a way that seemed both
charmingly lightheaded and almost playfully futuristic. Diametrically opposite
this light and elastic music, Lorns Ask the Dust (Ninja Tune) made the already
extremely dark and sorrowful sound of his 2010 LP Nothing even more dark and
sorrowful. Together with the Bit-Tuner EP it was pretty much the ultimate amalgam
of “ghoststep” and old fashioned doomstep, and basically just building on a
style that has been pretty well established for several years now; yet rarely
done this good. One of the years’ most overpowering albums, actually, even
though it’s probably a bit too pompous for some.
The “ghostly”
end of things - i.e. the grey area where poststep meld with hauntology and
other post techno/post everything deconstruction strategies, was generally very
active this year, and makes me wonder where poststep stops and the larger
experimental strategies right now take over. That’ll have to be a question for
another time; for now, I’ll just mention 2012s best albums from this interzone:
Offshores first (and, sadly, last) LP Bake Haus seemed a bit of mess to me to
begin with; unfinished sketches, run-of-the-mill beats and an overall
melancholia that often sounded almost like indietronica. Not my kind of thing
and not exactly futuristic. But nevertheless, Bake Haus just worms itself into
your brain in its own haunting, desolate way, and I find it really hard to put
my finger on why it works. Lukids Lonely at the Top, the first of his albums to
really get me, is similarly difficult to figure out. Dreamy decay-ology of the
kind I normally find a bit too dreamy and gaseous, but here it’s got just the
right edge. Finally, I guess the two Ital-albums Hive Mind and Dream On (both
Planet MU) sort of belong here, even though most would probably say they
represent a kind of psychedelic retro house. Well, perhaps they do, but the
disorienting, kaleidoscopic sound and the weird, grooveless use of half
dissolved samples is totally “now”, as far as I’m concerned.
OK, so more
than enough for now. I planned that this should have been all about the EPs,
and yet I ended writing more about the albums. Perhaps I’m still caught up in
the idea of “the album” myself. Ah well.
