Bleep
Aperture have put together something very special for their latest release: London producer Nigel Truswell, Oberman Knocks, releases Dilankex, a thudding, frayed monolith of a track backed by a seventeen minute remix from Warp artists Autechre. The original is a magnetic piece of hulking bass and clawing electronics that sounds like it could move mountains. Autechre's remix though completely reconfigures the original, drawing it out into a fractured monster of a track, tangled hard rhythms dissolving into desolate ambience full of tense energy.
Years ago, graphic designer Nigel Truswell was encouraged by Autechre's Sean Booth (among others) to create his own music. This probably turned out better than either of them expected: Truswell ended up creating brutal cinematic ambience with Skam-like beats under the name Oberman Knocks, and Booth reflected that the results made Autechre "sound like a posh garden party". Now, having championed Oberman Knocks on her Aperture imprint, electro stalwart Andrea Parker has facilitated an official meeting between the two. | he result is the Dilankex EP, a 5-and-a-half minute track from Oberman Knocks, backed by a staggering 17-and-a-haif minute remix by Autechre.
Knocks’ original Dilankex moves somewhere between the rotating grind of Shelley Parker and the harrowing digital clouds of Dalglish. Slithering forwards at 115 bpm, two glassy chords revolve as a snake’s nest of electroacoustic layers emerge around them. Shimmering pads, granular harmonies, bowed metal scrapes, malformed voices, trumpeting synth brass — all these and more form a writhing tide of sound design, engulfing an ominous lopsided march and uncomfortable electro bass gulps.
Texture dominates the flip too. As Booth recently remarked, for Autechre rhythm, melody and harmony are now almost entirely interchangeabie textures, and their remix of Dilankex makes great play of this. Now a tumbling flight at 145 bpm, the original is reassembled as a dense stream of furious activity. Panned dead centre throughout Is a thrashing core of colliding, grinding, stuttering fragments; defying definition, each voice Is simultaneously percussive, gestural and pitched, moving at intense speed and never settling on any one characteristic. The track's overall shape develops around this with patience, larger variations introduced through pads and harmonies unfolding into the wider stereo field.
But at 17-and-a-half minutes — and with no contrasting material — it is Knackering. | his durational aspect has become increasingly significant for Autechre ever since Oversteps, their expansive, virtuosic performances on limited voices seemingly underlining that each track is only the nth percentile of an infinite number of possibilities. This can be exhausting and, in this case, over-sized for the job at hand.
Still, the meta-textures are undeniably breathtaking, and the track may work differently in the right context. After all, DJ Stingray has shown just how expertly the sleeker, jaw-grinding, Shepard Tone masterpiece of Dial can be put into practice. Crucially though, while many listeners will instantly gravitate to the remix of Dilankex , Oberman Knocks original is its own superb, brief mass of dramatic atmosphere. It shouldn't be missed.
Though his recording career didn't take off until the mid 2000s, Nigel Truswell's love affair with electronic music dates back much further. It shows in his output as Oberman Knocks, which, in its frosty digital abstraction, clearly looks to vintage IDM for cues. As if to cement the link, his releases on Andrea Parker's Aperture have been remixed by the likes of Plaid and Skam's Quinoline Yellow, and this new single comes backed with an epic 17-minute reworking by Autechre, who are clearly an inspiration for Truswell's intricate arrangements and oblique sense of groove.
The original version of Dilankex is on the calmer side of Truswell's output, with only a muffled kick outlining the (unsteady) pulse beneath its mournful melodies and garbled midrange textures. There's a certain ponderous, swirling majesty to it, but Truswell struggles to achieve mix clarity, and the narrative arc is a tad predictable. Autechre, meanwhile, take no prisoners with their version. Where the recent L-Event EP thrived on space and textural depth, here we're plunged into hectic, hyper-compressed algorhythms from the off. What follows is a meticulous exercise in micro-groove management, sectional and exhausting, as if we're solving a succession of brow-furrowing maths problems. A sense of forward momentum only surfaces around the seven-minute mark, when reedy, accordion-like chords supply a slower undercurrent of movement. The effect is to render that rhythmic chaos suddenly ineffectual, like the angry chittering of an insect trapped in a jar.
Soul Kitchen (Fr)
It's been a while since the merry folks of this cheerful city that is Sheffield had given birth (painfully certainly) to a remix. I'm not going to be clever and say that I love Oberman Knocks, never heard of it, nor of the label he works on. On this label, we find the no less joyful Andrea Parker, who is the boss it seems, as well as Marc Clifford of Seefeel and Chantal Passamonte of Mira Calix, to give you an idea of the level of cheerfulness and abstraction in question. In this world where everything goes faster and faster and where everyone tends to express themselves with big monosyllables, it's happy that a great band like Autechre gives us the remix of almost 18 minutes. Otherwise the original title is good too but only lasts 5 minutes. Well as usual, it's limited to 500 copies and no doubt that in 3 days it will be very expensive on Discogs.
Le Drone (Fr)
I don't doubt for a second that you are very busy people. As such, I also have no doubt that you have better things to do to occupy your free time between two sessions of exchanging portmanteau words on Facebook than to inflict upon yourself arthropoid and dismantled monsters of 17-minute post-digital racket , whose infinitesimal beauties on the Planck scale require holding a magnifying glass to the corner of your nose to be appreciated. At the same time, I do not doubt for a second the respect you have, directly or indirectly, for this fabulous entity of modern music that is Autechre.
So allow me to direct you for a moment to the Youtube below, which allows you to listen to the duo's first remix in ages (if I'm not mistaken, the remix of "Skeng" by The Bug / Kevin Martin in 2010), which actually lasts 17 minutes and 11 seconds and whose strange shape actually evokes the sinuous swirl of a somewhat monstrous creature from the depths whose main characteristic would be to shed every 4 seconds.
As usual, Sean Booth and Rob Brown prefer to shine the spotlight on a confidential IDM craftsman (here the very obscure Oberman Knocks, signed on Aperture by veteran Andrea Parker) rather than the latest fashionable hunk and cannot resist not tempted to stand out - creating a 17-minute remix from a song that lasted 5, you will even concede that it borders on the odious. But as every time they devote a little of their precious time to the development of a remix rather than one of their own pieces, they shape an extraordinary sound object, both super hard and hyper-sophisticated, about which it would be frankly inappropriate to just sneer.
So you do what you want, you take a day of RTT, you skip your nap or you kick your cat in the butt rather than give him a big cuddle, but you do me the pleasure of listen to this whole thing. Once is not customary, the big thing full of air and dark ideas that serves as your noggin will perhaps say “thank you”.