Album: Reeling Skullways
Label: Punch Drunk
Release Date: April 2012
Where I Got It: Impulse buy from Juno. I mostly looked at it because it's on the still-awesome Punch Drunk label, but it was the snippets that sold me. I did originally confuse him with Ekoplekz and wondered why he'd cleaned up the noise so much. Some people say you should never judge an album by its snippets, but I'm glad I did.
Packaging: 2LP in a normal sleeve. Peverelist's Clunk Click Every Trip 12" is one of the best sounding records I own and I don't know if the same person mastered them or whatever, but this has the same sort of depth and clarity i.e. it sounds amazing.
Thoughts:
I find there's something deeply romantic about techno music. Not romantic in the Jennifer Aniston sense, but more in the proper, Byronic sense. From the starstruck escapism of Juan Atkins and the aquatic Afrofuturism of Drexciya to the desolate, chemical London of Burial's Untrue, the best techno is visionary and enveloping, taking the listener into alternate worlds (or, for something a little more obviously romantic, check out Carl Craig as 69's Desire, where the roseate glow of the keyboards seems to spill through the entire cosmos). These worlds live inside the listener's head as much as the artist's, visions inspired by the freedom and motion of machine music. Great electronic music takes you on a journey inside a single track.
Which leads me nicely into Bass Clef's Reeling Skullways, which opens (on the vinyl version, at least) with the track "Hackney - Chicago - Jupiter" which departs from his hometown, pays its respects to its roots in classic techno then heads off into interstellar space, waving at a whole other set of influences along the way. Its homemade kosmiche pulse gradually gets deeper and squelchier, the kick propelling banks of synthesizers out of the atmosphere where it catches the contrails of some electro-funk voyager out of Detroit and basks in the sun's rays. There's a palpable sense of motion, of watching new frontiers accelerate towards you from the horizon.
The side-long "Electricity Comes From Other Planets" is twistier and gnarlier, a journey more through inner space than outer space, riding the grain of the sound, dissecting the waveform to untangle fractal spatters of sound and render them in widescreen. Flip over to Side C and "A Rail is a Road and a Road is a River" is maybe, just maybe, the highlight on an album of impeccably realised tracks. Drifting into luminous view on the back of gaseous keyboards, it gradually assembles itself into an oscillating, bass-heavy groove that picks up cosmic detritus before the afterburners kick in and it resolves into something sleek, hurtling through the interstellar depths. None of this is necessarily making any new ground: the album's touchstones are undeniable but the way these tracks are assembled and the paths they travel make them as compelling and as vital as the music they reference. With the 'bass music' spectrum spending most of its time flailing around looking for interesting alleys to turn down, it's rare to hear something with such resolution and purpose.
It ends with the smeared drift of "Ghost Kicks in the Spiral" where solar flares of electro struggle to escape from the ambient hum of the stars, strewn like dust through the sky. The label on Side D states "made on machines by machines for machines" which leads me back to romanticism, but where the original romantics were awestruck by the beauty of nature, these techno romantics are smitten with the possibilities of machines. Listening to Reeling Skullways, it's as if the humans involved are just an accidental conduit for this music, machines finding a way to speak to each other across time and space. As if when Skynet awoke all it wanted to do was dance.
Rating: 628,749,421 (the approximate distance from Hackney to Chicago to Jupiter when Jupiter is at its closest).
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