Director's cut version of a review published in The Wire #345 (November 2012)
Raime
Quarter Turns Over A Living Line
Blackest
Ever Black CD/2xLP/DL
If
it feels difficult to praise Raime's debut album unreservedly, it's
partially due to a mistrust of the frankly adolescent impulse to
align Importance and Profundity with sombreness or outright despair.
It's also out of concern for readers' emotional equilibrium. In a
moment when electronic music's libidinal economy is one of exquisite
overload and frenetic sensuality (Rustie, HudMo, Flying Lotus, Night
Slugs' whole roster) it seems almost callous to recommend something
so sparse, so fatalistic, so blackly compelling. But then it's
difficult not to think that it forms the other side of the coin to
that aesthetic: it is, in that sense, just as necessary, sensually
and historically. Its pleasures are those of the violent
hollowing-out of dancefloor forms, of the exhaustion that waits at
the end of the night.
The
album arrives loaded with both anticipation and context. One of the
attractive things about the first Raime 12”s and mixes was their
opacity: minimal sleeves, gnomic titles, no physical presence, a
return almost to the jungle records that, we would later learn, Joe
Andrews and Tom Halstead loved. Soon enough the fog around them, and
around Blackest Ever Black, the label that has put out all their
releases to date, cleared: they did interviews, gigs; we learned that
FACT editor Kiran Sande runs the label, and of its connection
to Downwards, Sandwell District and the more brutal end of British
Techno. It became clear, in fact, just how carefully 'curated' (that
dreaded term!) both act and label were – from mixes of
ultra-obscure European post-punk and a website dotted with grand
guignol graphics that clicked through to Industrial and rave
tunes, to an exquisitely-designed catalogue that combined all of
these with Noise and archival soundtrack releases.
The
relevance of all this to Quarter Turns Over A Living Line
itself is questionable. It feels as fully-formed and autonomous as
those first records; far from the smug flaunting of taste that so
often takes itself for formal innovation now, it feels like the
ruination, the explosion, of a sonic language, its dissipation into
particles until all that's left is a choking, noxious cloud. Like the
shape of a Rorschach blot, any number of influences or resonances can
be traced out of it, but none convincingly names it; more than that,
any other music belongs to a comforting past that's out of reach to
the devastated present it inhabits. If any echo convinces at all,
it's with Shackleton's re-sculpting of dubstep as a thing of negative
space and primal dread. (They even share some tropes: quasi-tribal
hand percussion, vocal fragments blurred almost into non-existence.)
To listen is to confront it as sound that gives no signposts: opener
“Passed Over Trail” begins with a huge thrum of bass noise,
ghosted by mid-range ebbs, squalls and treble arcs like stifled
screams, less a track than an atmosphere that seems like it could go
on interminably. When the tripping percussion of “The Last
Foundry”, a version of “This Foundry” from their debut EP in
2010, enters, it feels like regaining solid ground momentarily; but
rather than being joined by the expected half-step snare, it's left
to sharp and melancholy pads and suppurating bass tones. When the
snare finally lands more than a minute in, it's huge and hollow as
any doom metal hit, as if the drummer had slumped on the kit; when it
repeats it seems uncanny, a motion suspended between life and a
dwindling into stillness.
The duo have a virtuosic sense of composition, of how to organise
both large elements (bass tremors, percussion hits) and spaces, and
micrological details, like negatives of darkside jungle tunes. The
tracks benefit immensely from high volume: they constitute themselves
as forcefields of tension between starkly delineated fragments.
Individual gestures nag like scraps from faltering memory, links to a
physical reality now wholly alienated – the scrape of
guitar-strings on “Your Cast Will Tire”, the thump of toms on
“Exist In The Repeat of Practice”. “The Walker In Blast And
Bottle” takes the venerable video-game bleep from “Planet Rock”
and turns it into a brittle siren, the barely-holding centre of a
construct of muffled drums, juddering noise that substitutes for bass
and a choir of synths that call to mind nothing but the end of
Godspeed You Black Emperor's “Antennas To Heaven”. “Your Cast
Will Tire” shows how subtle their construction is, its astute uses
of reverb, syncopation and space – echoing fretscrapes and
bass-drum punctured by dry hits like the “fell sergeant, death”
knocking – establishing a beautiful webbed architecture of
resonances. The rhythm is frequently close to a
flatline, every heave of percussion effortful, its logic one
of resignation, as each pulse, its rise and fall, pulls you further
down a path with no end.
Where
a lot of what Ryan Diduck, in a recent piece for The Quietus, has
tagged as “the new bleak” is in certain ways quite soothing –
blurred, drugged-out, bleakly soporific – Raime's work, alternately
crystalline and amorphous, provides, if any, a very cold comfort. The
raw strings that gird “The Dimming Of Road And Rights” – hard
not to connect that title with the entropic loss of all good things
most of Europe is currently experiencing under the rubric of
'austerity' – indicate the cold, almost cosmic depths and spaces of
this music, the only thing to get lost in beside the hurt, cathartic
joy beside a percussion track that feels like nothing less than the
death-drive, frustrated. Having come this far, it's difficult not to
feel that it's a brilliant dead-end for the project: what, after all,
could they do from here, but refine the formula, go further out into
the ruins? In this, it seems, Quarter Turns... dramatises a
more general situation. Raime are now identifiable auteurs,
tagged with identifiable influences. The sheltering shadows of
obscurity in which their work gestated are rare in an economy
demanding the constant turnover of novelty. In zeroing in on the
darkness at the heart of that frenzy of languages, the intimation of
last things in a crisis-ridden culture, they've made something deeply
necessary.
