Director's cut version of a review published in The Wire #339 (May 2012)
Bobby Browser
Just
Browsing
100%
Silk 12”
Strategy
Boxy
Music EP
100%
Silk 12”
SFV
Acid
Grown
100%
Silk 12”
Peaking
Lights
936
Remixed
100%
Silk 12”
The
dancefloor, we're told, is static. The accusations of derivativeness
aimed at the musicians around 100% Silk – alleged outsiders
fetishising and repeating earlier stages in dance music's evolution –
are repetitions of a general fear of slowdown in musical innovation –
a fear that perhaps mistakes these records' relationship with the
language of a sonic past held in the fluid medium of digital
archives. It may be better to ask what these materials are doing,
what needs they answer and articulate – what structure of feeling
shows through their flickers of synthetics and amyl nitrate haze. One
thing evident from the four most recent 100% Silk releases is that
the records are far from being Xeroxes of the heroic age of dance
music: their backward glances are crucial, but they aren't dependent
on them; their generically unplaceable variations on the models of
Acid, Electro and Italo return us to the genesis of those conventions
themselves, crystallising the pressures of their time through
technological accident and the liberated contingency of the club.
Bobby
Browser's “Smooth Cruise” starts with incongruous splashy drums
that give way to a spacious disco strut pierced by keening synths and
Acid bleeps; “Airbody” summons the rhythms of early piano House
and the sumptuous, gliding motion of late electro singles like Klein
& MBO's “Dirty Talk”. SFV Acid's faded, lo-fi take on the
form also favours the lower tempos, pads and softened 303 basslines,
with each motion being given its own space, cultivating a dreamy
atmosphere apart from the blunt, driving mania of vintage Acid
(though there's nothing as deliriously damaged here as on Cuticle's
Confectioner Beats EP);
in “Knights”, fragile synths pinched from a Terry Riley record
are swamped by multiple 808 lines, peeking occasionally out of the
weft. Whilst the records hold their own as prompts to dance, there's
something withheld and private about their atmospheres, their
gestures warped by a lack at their heart; they focus intense yearning
through the language of disco and House's own never-staunched
desires, a language of erotic plenitude whose pastness adds its own
inflection of regret.
The
remix 12” of Peaking Lights' 936 is
something of a blip in the catalogue. The only refix that makes a
real improvement on its original is Xander Harris' version of “Birds
Of Paradise”, which integrates a slow-motion Italo bounce
underneath the vocals and emphasises the excellent bassline, really
lifting off in the last minute; but it does reinforce just how
strong, and how strange, the other takes on the period are. On
Strategy's “Bolly Valve Reduction”, the jumping, shrieking 303
line of “Bolly Valve 2000” – itself a strange refiguring of
Acid into almost pure texture – is filter-tweaked into a scream,
the track becoming a rhythmic plateau in which sound seems constantly
on the brink of disappearing, becoming a ghost of itself. This is
where dance meets the nostalgic repetition-compulsion of the likes of
The Caretaker: disappearing into its own reverie over its distant,
opaque materials; the records resound with the utopian spaces that
birthed their sources, historical moments experienced only through
the medium of records, the transient moment of audition – hence
their strangely disembodied sensuality. Even the sleeve and label
designs, with a calm female face coalescing out of what looks like a
visualisation of modem hiss, take on the mass-produced language of a
modernist pop – all those Strictly Rhythm and West End 12”s you
collected – shadowed by loss, taking on, in the midst of an
economic crisis still shadowed by semiotic overproduction, a
seductive charge.
No comments:
Post a Comment