The tide of
post dubstep seems to be turning. As 2013 draws to a close, there’s no denying
that the year has seen a clear decrease in amazing new music. In truth, things
looked much more grim during the first half of the year, and especially the
last months has offered a nice run-up of brilliant releases, but nevertheless:
The three previous years constant surge of strangeness and surprise has started
to dry up. This realisation is of course making me a bit sad, but I guess it shouldn't
be surprising. I've been through at least one – albeit much different – golden
age before, and I now know that they never last, so I've been prepared. And,
considering that we've already got 3-4 stellar years, and that 2013 is still
going to be stellar by any other standard than that of 2010-2012, the poststep
era has already delivered so much incredible music that it probably is pretty
far-fetched to expect it to go on like that much longer. And even though
keeping track of the good stuff has become much easier, there still is a lot of
great new stuff to keep track on, it's just not in the same stunning amounts as
before, and it’s mostly further developments of the major poststep trends,
rather than completely unprecedented new ideas.
The most significant
sign of the waning momentum is probably that, even though there actually is
just as much new poststep coming out as before, the majority of it is horribly
dull and regressive, mostly stuff from the “bass”-department (pointless, polite
and painfully tasteful house, really), as well as the awful hybrid of
downtempo, synth-pop and dreampop-step (James Blakes lame spawn). There’s so
much of this crap clogging up poststeps veins that the records that actually do
push forward and continue the future drive of the last three years, doesn't
make the impact they ought to. This is particularly clear when looking at EPs:
This used to be the frontier where the maddest, strangest and most powerfully
forwardthinking stuff crystallised, dedicated and determined to be more than
just soundcloud or bandcamp-data, yet still with a freshness and restless
vision that too often got slightly diluted when the artists got around to
making “proper” albums.
Sure, there’s
a ton of new poststep EPs, but they're mostly in the aforementioned house
department, and I suppose this means that the EP format to some degree is
returning to its traditional role as anonymous club tool containers rather than
the exciting mini-LP-as-stylistic-laboratory approach of the last couple of
years. For the first time in poststep history, albums are now where things are
primarily happening. Hyperdub in particular seems to be taking the lead, having
done a Warp and transformed into - mostly - an album label, with a recognisable
roster of big poststep players. Which is altogether the trend: The major names,
having been around for some time, now increasingly seem to try and build a
career around massive, “significant” albums.
Poststeps
first real album artist was Burial, but he has, paradoxically, only made EPs for
the last six years. Next to him, the biggest name around is Zomby, whose second
album, With Love, was probably one of the most anticipated poststep album of
2013. Well, if Slugabeds Time Team wasn't quite the great album it could havebeen because of its clumsy and unnecessary huge-bordering-on-the-bloated-format,
that is nothing compared to this double album/triple vinyl monstrosity,
packaged in a ridiculously big and impractical gatefold cover that doesn't
really look neither impressive nor luxurious, but just takes up a grotesque
amount of space on your table or shelf, like a huge lump of unmanageable
cardboard covered in oh so stylish black roses.
Now I'm
actually quite tolerant of overblown magnum opus albums packed in extravagant
boxes, but only when the content is sufficiently ambitious and well-considered
to pull it off. Exai was the first Autechre-album I've bought in many years,
and more than anything that was because of its bulky proportions, not despite of them. Even though the cover design of that box is deadly dull (a classic
Autechre-design you could say), the box format fits like a glove because this
is a couple of electronic veterans going all in, giving you so much stuff to
get lost in that the album seems like a world in itself – as the best box sets
should do. The point is: that is not exactly what Zomby does on With Love. Had
he actually delivered an overwhelming treasure trove of riches, perfectly
crafted compositions forming a breathtaking whole, or a maze of brilliant new
ideas going in all sorts of strange directions, then there'd be some sense in
presenting it like some grand statement. However, it's pretty much just a big
heap of the usual not-quite-finished and often rather samey tracks in the
well-established Zomby-styles.
You could
say that that's just how Zomby works – his tracks have always been rough
sketches, suddenly cutting of when he didn't feel like doing more with them,
and I've nothing against that approach per se, rough and sketchy compositions
can be fine and fascinating, and for some producers that might simply be how
they do their best stuff and keep it fresh. I can't say whether Zomby's simply
incapable of developing simple ideas to more fully rounded compositions, or
whether his just too lazy or self satisfied to do so, but it has pretty much
always been what he does, and that is not really a problem when his sketches
really are fresh and highly original, even when they feel like unfinished
doodling. However, if that's what you do, it comes off as pretty ridiculous
when you pile up a huge, hardly sorted mess of those unfinished doodlings, wrap
it in a big pompous luxury-package like it was a 20-year anniversary-re-release
of some canonised “masterwork”, and price it accordingly. Buying such a thing,
you'd at least expect the composer to be able to work out how to sustain and
develop the potential in a really promising idea, rather than just letting it
go round in circles a few times and then cutting it off when it becomes clear
that he has to put some effort into bringing it to a conclusion. At the very least you'd expect that the most one-dimensional ideas would be the ones to be
cut off after the shortest time, rather than going on far beyond their welcome,
while the tracks with the most potential, detail and layers, wouldn't be
stopped before you had the chance to fully take them in and appreciate them.
And you certainly wouldn't expect a lot of tracks being slightly different
takes on the same idea.
I'm well
aware that this is how Zomby makes his music, that doesn't prevent him from
making amazing tunes (even if it prevents them from being even more amazing),
but I sure wish he would work with a format that would fit that modus operandi.
A short, sharp and trimmed single-LP with the best tracks from With Love would
have been a killer – his best so far and perhaps the album of the year. In its
current shape, it seems more like denial, an attempt to hide that what he does
is essentially (and brilliantly) unfinished doodling, as if a puffy, extravagant
packaging would somehow elevate the tracks to more than that. The effect is the
opposite - the samey, unfinished quality sticks out much more than it needed to,
had the tracks been placed in more straightforward surroundings actually reflecting
the music. And it’s a shame, because there’s no denying that Zomby is still
making great music, even when apparently not putting much effort into it, it’s
still unique, instantly recognisable as him, and often as ghostly unreal as
it’s immediately moving. He’s just making it much harder to appreciate.
On the plus
side, this time Zomby for once doesn’t spread out a few tracks, with the
playing time of a long EP or short LP, on more sides of vinyl than they in any
reasonable way need, as with the Zomby-EP, One Foot Ahead of the Other and
Dedication. With Love could easily have been a double rather than a triple, but
here it’s Mostly because it’s just too long and contains too many tracks. To
get an idea of how a more restrained approach could have worked out, you could
compare With Love with Desto’s Emptier Streets, which generally comes off as a
better album, even though the tunes on it perhaps aren’t as clearly original or
memorable as Zombys. Pretty much working with a singular vision, but also sharpening
this vision into a compact, equally singular wholse, Emptier Streets is much
more immediately powerful and convincing than self-consciously “big” records
like Time Team or With Love, even if the tracks, in themselves, are more unique
on those.
Previously,
Desto had a slightly more raw and ravey sound, but with Emptier Streets he’s
more in the tradition of Distances My Demons and Nosaj Things Drift: Heavy,
noisy dancefloor forms (here elements of trap-step and vestiges of bit-step)
are weirdly inverted, all movements slowed down as if taking place in a glazed,
sub zero ghost world. There’s plenty of bittersweet melodies and weird beats,
but they're so submerged in the brittle and unreal overall flow that you hardly
notice them at first – everything seems to blur into one long somnambulist
nightwalk through a deserted and strangely intangible city. The result is
something that almost, in a way, seems to be conceived as a kind of “classic
IDM”-style album – a cerebral, atmospheric “alternative” to a cruder popular
form – but nevertheless consisting of stylistic ideas and ambiguous structures
that would pretty much be inconceivable without the last four years of poststep
development. And – as it’s the case with more or less all the best poststep,
practically the definition actually - it manages to transform the cruder
popular form into odd art without losing its essence, something that “classic
IDM” almost never managed to pull off.
Emptier Streets is a strong contestant for album of the year, but you can't completely
deny that there's an element of poststep coming full circle to it – after the
relentless drive towards the unknown of the last three years (the structural
madness and colourful futurism of bitstep, hyper grime, skweee and Rustie-style
maximalism), we're back at the end-of-history-hopelessness and
dead-city-meditations of Burial, Distance and Nosaj Thing. Not that those
elements ever really disappeared as a strong undercurrent in poststep, but now
they more or less seem to be back as the central theme – the future as an
insubstantial phantom, constantly out of reach and slipping through our
fingers, rather than something going on here and now. This is also the case
with Waltons debut album Beyond: the sharp and twisted hypergrime that was the
best parts of his previous EPs have almost completely disappeared, and instead
we get an album of twitchy late night grooves and dislocated vocal fragments –
i.e. pretty much the elements that characterized the earliest strain of
burialesque poststep. Not that it’s a backward-looking album exactly, there's
mostly a strange, inorganic angularity to the grooves that is much more in line
with Jam Citys brilliant Classical Curves from last year than with standard
funky or retro-garage (despite the generous amount of awful soul samples which
the album really could have done without). On its best tracks Beyond is indisputably
original and forward-thinking, but the overall feel is nevertheless like a return
to the defeatist zombie-futurism of the earliest poststep.
Interestingly,
this is to some degree reversed with Aerotropolis, the second album from
Ikonika. She seemed like one of the absolute poststep figureheads back in 2011,
but since then a lot of the original buzz surrounding her has disappeared, and
this is perhaps mirrored in the more “classic” electronic sound of the album,
which still goes for the futurist spirit and attitude, but through a music that
is nevertheless much less future-sounding than before. This does not mean - as
some have suggested - that Aerotropolis is retro music as such: Despite using a
very eighties-specific sound palette, it doesn’t really sound at all like the
eighties house and freestyle that was allegedly the inspiration. Rather, it’s still
very clearly Ikonika, the melodies are pretty much shaped the same weird way as
on Contact, Love, Want, Have, they’re just combined with more straightforward
beats and less spiralling arcade-sounds. Conceptually, it’s sort of an
experiment in counterfactual history, imagining how she could have twisted the
raw materials of an earlier era into a different future path, and as such it’s
part of a larger trend of “new synth” - electronic music that seems to reject
the acid/rave-revolution as the point where everything really got started, and
rather see the essence of electronic music as the floating future-worlds of
earlier eighties and seventies synth, whether through direct imitation (as with
a lot of the “experimental electronics” - bordering the entropic camp - going
on right now), or through a complete reimagining of classic synth futurism - a
bit like how the new pop-groups tried to resurrect a golden, anti-rockist pop aesthetic
of producer-vision and song writing as craft.
The “new
synth” approach is present in different parts of poststep and with poststep-related
players, such as Fatima al Qadiri, the early Laurie Halo of Hour Logic, and
especially Kuedo on Severant, which is perhaps the closest relative to Aerotropolis:
Both albums are basically a completely current electronic music masquerading as
classic synth-nostalgia rather than the other way round. Where Severant was sort of an amazing world by
itself, though, Aerotropolis is less strikingly original, as well as more
uneven quality-wise. “Beach Mode” is a horrible attempt to make vocal pop, and tracks
like “Mr Cake” and “Eternal Mode” come off as failed experiments with
Rustie-ish maximalism, completely lacking the twisted mania that makes Rustie
so great. Still, all those tracks are at the beginning of Aerotropolis, and as
soon as you get past them, it’s mostly a great album, sometimes even brilliant.
Perhaps too classy and polished to be among the absolute frontline this year,
but still an odd and fascinating time-out-of-joint-exercise in alternate
futurology.
The-Drums
Contact could also be seen as belonging in the “new synth” department, yet it
manages to reach the ideal of a truly new synth music - a reactivation of a
pre-rave future-rush through a completely new and current aesthetic - so smoothly
and effortlessly that it basically feels timeless, rather than either “new” or
“retro”. It’s all slowly drifting sci fi-soundscapes full of cosmic loneliness
and longing, but first and foremost created through endless layers of corroded-yet-ethereal
voice manipulations - one of the key elements defining poststeps sound of now.
Still, it’s done with such lightness and elegance that it somehow doesn’t feel
as futuristic as it is. Contact doesn’t hit you in the face with bizarre sounds
and structures, which I guess is why Adam Harper consider it slightly backwards-looking and eighties-sounding, though I can’t find much in it that sounds
even remotely like it’s referencing anything from the past, and even when it
does, I think it’s mostly superficial - some timbres and effects will
eventually appear when you’re orchestrating with vocal samples to the degree
that is happening here, but except for the odd isolated shade of a sound here
and there, I simply can’t hear how it should be reminiscent of Art of Noise or
Depeche Mode in any way. Perhaps Harper is only thinking in production terms,
but then the argument becomes really silly - if you’re unable to create
something new using older tools and approaches, then a lot of stuff that we’re
usually considering groundbreaking would automatically be regressive.
I do agree
with Harper that Contact eventually feels a bit more familiar than The-Drum’s
previous stuff, but I think the problem is mostly the well known one for albums
with this kind of music: It goes on for too long, and becomes too samey. I don’t
hear an overall downsizing of futuristic vision compared to the Sense Net-EP
(if anything, Heavy Liquid is their real masterpiece in purely futuristic
terms), Contact pretty much tries to develop the Sense Net-vision to a larger
format, and it mostly succeeds. It’s just that the format would have gained by
not being quite as large; it drags on and lose focus towards the end, and
especially the vocal driven title track is horribly pedestrian, while the
closing “Mantra” is the only time where I think Harper is right about the album
sounding like it could have been a eighties sci fi-score - it does sound much
like some Vangelis tracks, especially parts of Blade Runner and The City. So,
yeah, Contact could have been shaped better, but it’s nevertheless one of the
most convincing experiments in envisioning a truly new cosmic sci fi-music I’ve
heard so far - so convincing, that it doesn’t even sound like an experiment at
all!
The albums
from Zomby, Desto, Walton, Ikonika and The-Drum are only a fragment of poststeps
album-output his year, and some of the very best ones have come long since I
started this piece many months ago, or have been made by much less known
artists (well, perhaps not les known than Desto I guess, who I mostly included
here for the contrast with Zomby. As so often before I had planned to get this
done much earlier - it’s not a 2013 survey, but rather a closer look at records
that I think show the shift from EP-oriented experimentalism to a focus on “significant albums”. There’s
other albums that would fit this idea in one way or another - DJ Rashads Double Cup as footworks final integration into album oriented poststep, or Om Units
massive crossover-exercise Threads - but I never got around to including them,
they came too late in the year, and didn’t quite manage to convince me as much
as even Ikonika and Walton did, despite their obvious flaws.
It has been
tempting to just give up the original idea and turn this piece into a “best-of-postetep-2013”
list instead, but then it would most likely have gone completely out of hand,
and I’d rather deal with posteps 2013-merits - or lack thereof - until sometime
after the year has actually ended. But just if anyone’s looking for tips for
the Christmas shopping: the best of 2013 definitely include these: Eprom’s
Halflife, En2ak’s 3, Co La’s Moody Coup, Lil’ Jabba’s Scales, Clouds’ USB Island, 96wrld’s Private Language, Ital
Tek’s Control, and Eloq’s C’MON. Some are albums, some are EPs, some are
perhaps something in between, but all are great. More about that, and about
other good stuff, some time next year. Probably.
