55. 100% Silk

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.