The Death Of Rave Downbeat | Electronica | Leftfield 10 Items

‘Traditional Music of South London' is the riveting new masterwork by Dale Cornish, a survey of recent and ancient folklore spanning deep house concrète, industrial dubstep and folk musiks inspired by urban gay mythology and reminding us of everything from Tricky to Jandek, DJ Sprinkles to Leslie Winer, Wasteland, Coil and Wanda Group to Andy Stott.

Since emerging as part of London’s shouty electroclash movement in the mid ‘00s, and assuming the role of deconstructed rave pioneer and poet in 2011, Dale Cornish has been (lo)key to new movements in electronic music’s underbelly for the best part of this century. His 12th LP, proper, ‘Traditional Music of South London’ feels like Dale’s definitive record; a confident testament to artistic maturity that comes with doing your thing against the grain over decades, and a potent expansion on ideas chiselled during his run of releases with the inspirational (now sadly defunct) label, Entr’acte, who helped foster Dale’s explorations of concrète rave and industrial pop tropes during the ‘10s..

On one level the album reads as a deep topography or psychosexual-geography of London’s lost gay club haunts, with the meat-motoring deep house of ‘Great Storm’ recalling DJ Sprinkles taking Loefah to the darkroom in its concrète carved and flesh trembling 8:08 perfection; or more literally in ‘Foxhole’, with Dale’s deliciously Croydon-toned accent describing urban gay mythologies with pungent lyrics about rotten fox cadavers synced to drily ricocheting hand claps, while the tight swinge of his “requiem for all the dead gay venues” in the gut-level bass of ‘Hoist Crash Fort’, and the playful evocation of “internecine conflict within the gays - live!” on ‘Palace Intrigue’ just utterly slap like nothing else.

Yet it’s in the LP’s slower, bloozier and folky vocal bits that Dale’s dare- to-differ character comes into its own. The clandestine skulk of ‘My Geography’ portrays him like a modern Jandek traversing London’s brutalist-meets-semi rural meridian, and at its gooier core flashes of folk-classical brilliance such as the groggy ‘Norman Lewis’ give way to the writhing foley orgy of ‘Crowd Scene’, while the naked, one-take end of szn paean of ‘scy BFR Hnh’ and slurred, Tricky-esque confessional ’Shout Outs’ consolidate and temper the conflicting aspects of his persona with a deep burning pathos in the LP’s fading phosphorescence.

In an era of overproduction and imitation-not-innovation, Dale’s strikingly original, sensually brutalist industro-folk-dance-pop critically cocks a snook at conventional, careerist music while embracing its heartical truths. An extremely personal record certain to resonate with those who believe art in music still matters, we love it to death.

Cover with a beginning seam split at the upper edge.

Mark Leckey finally presents the soundtrack to his autobiographical allegory ‘O’ Magic Power of Bleakness’, a mind sluicing fantasy/autobiographical narrative inspired by folklore and half-remembered tales of teenage life growing up in the Wirral, a personal history woven into screwed 808s, ringtones, sacred chimes, smudged synths, sirens and levitating ambience that sounds like nowt else. Following his seminal, hauntological trips ‘Fiorucci Made me Hardcore’ (2012) and ‘Dream English Kid 1964 - 1999ad’ (2016); the 3-part accompaniment to ‘O’ Magic Power Of Bleakness’ captures the Turner Prize-winning artist moving beyond signature collage tekkers to create an entirely original arrangement for his latest audio-visual installation at Tate Britain in 2019 - a life-size replica of a motorway bridge on the M53 on the Wirral, Merseyside. In situ, the soundtrack is a vital component of the installation, livicating its liminal space with a narrative arc that magically turns familiar, popular and folkwise tropes into an occultural tale about provenance and a reminder of the supernatural in the modern world. Leckey approaches the piece as “an autobiographical allegory” in an attempt to locate the enduring enigma of sub/urban British life with uncanny insight. Alongside his own narration, a plethora of Scouse-kids play out the story of an aspirational kid who escapes the Wirral not to London, but to the faerie realm spoken of in Northern European folklore. When he crashes down to earth, his friends don’t understand who, or what, he’s become. It ultimately concludes in a symphonic supernatural riot, culminating a sort of metaphysical transformation common to Traditional Ballads and reminding us of the angel/redemption sequence at the end of Lynch’s ‘Fire Walk With Me’. ‘O’ Magic Power Of Bleakness’ is a well-worn story that’s brutally familiar to anyone who’s escaped the clutches of one of Britain’s forgotten, Tory-scoured battlefields. But Leckey’s treatment is transformative; he offsets observed reality with the surreal verve of folklore like a theme park ride thru a Britain the country prefers not to remember, decorated with themes that have been looped around our collective consciousness for thousands of years. Leckey’s art has essentially come to reflect the psyche of a generation, divining the poetic and occult from the seeming banality of British life by tapping into leylines that riddle the concrete landscape to the imagination. Specifically (if allegorically) it’s Leckey’s life in focus but, on the broadest level, the work speaks to the politics of big town parochiality vs. the elusive lure of big city glitter, in a way that’s bound to resonate with many listeners who’ve made that same transition and questioned their place in-between worlds in the process.

Radical protagonist of “feral gore feminist Asmr”, Ronce delivers a truly shocking debut album based on the female form and the violence that comes with it: surveillance, self disgust, anger, touch, desire (or lack thereof). It’s no doubt among the most disturbing yet arresting pieces of experimental music released in recent years, highly recommended listening if yr into Frederikke Hoffmeier, Perila, Maja Ratkje, ELpH/Coil, Kevin Drumm, Sam Kidel, Rashad Becker. Cathartic or deeply discomfiting, depending your disposition, either way ‘Malignant’ sounds quite unlike anything else in the contemporary field. It follows from the French artist’s now-impossible to find 7” ‘Lolita / Acteon’, issued by the Dawn label in January 2020, with a steeper and starker interrogation of its themes; abuse, power dynamics, and how it felt to be a 20 year old woman visible only under the gaze of men, and experiencing, as she says “the visceral need to escape it, to escape the hands and the eyes and crawl out of the physical body; rising above.” Yet for all its excoriating harshness, the album is ultimately a positive gesture on how to navigate trauma and eventually come out of it. While the process was not easy or enjoyable, it was vital for the artist and, by turns, should be considered crucial listening.

Captured Entities’ is the debut album of deeply raw house and psycho-jit-jazz by Detroit producer and DJ, Howard Thomas aka H-Fusion. Spanning the breadth of Howard’s hands-on, tracky style - from beatless cosmic jazz audities to slamming 170bpm missiles and heart-grabbing house - it’s arguably one of the most distinctive, dare-to-be-different albums from the 313 in recent memory. The fruit of more than 5 years of communication between Howard and The Death of Rave, ‘Captured Entities’ expands on the ruffneck, asymmetric slant of his killer 2005-2012 productions for Sound Signature and Fit - as played by everyone from Kyle Hall to Kassem Mosse - across 11 unruly numbers united by an intuitive, jazz-wise approach to his synths and MPC2000. While his sound may remind of many Detroit greats such as Omar-S, Damon Peterson/8088, and Urban Tribe/DJ Stingray, Howard can’t help but sound like himself, and his debut album is best defined by its classically driven yet singular Detroit soul clinamen.

William Gibson’s prophetic sci-fi novel Neuromancer inspires Mumdance, Logos and Shapednoise to sensational new heights on their 2nd EP in The Sprawl trilogy for The Death of Rave. The trio’s EP2 is all about “Data Flow”, or the relay of information between software, hardware and its human agents, triangulating The Sprawl as biologic semiconductors in a quantum network of emerging AI consciousness, parsing their corrupted memory flashbacks of physical ecstasy, excess and synaptic muscle memory into premonitory visions of future hardcore rave.

Still in a zone of its own, ‘The Neurobiology of Moral Decision Making’ is the result of Mark Fell’s trip to Budapest in 2014, where he and his acolyte, Gábor Lázár practically unravelled the vernacular of contemporary computer and club musics and re-stitched them into brilliantly new & devious designs. Decimating elements familiar to 2-step, footwork, electro, flashcore and f*ck knows, they arrived at a mutual conclusion of sleekly turbulent minimalism in 10 jawdropping permutations that dance in the integers of rave music. In the process they effectively re-programmed limbic and motor systems in-the-moment with a wickedly diffractive sense of rhythmic anticipation and shockingly crisp sound for a pinnacle of modern experimental dance music. With benefit of hindsight, we can now hear this album as a watershed moment for both artists, and this style of production. Since its release, Mark has notably moved away from the sound to work with acoustic instrumentalists, while Gábor has firmly picked up the baton and run with it on the likes of 2018’s ‘Unfold’ album, and more recently ‘Boundary Object’ with Planet Mu. It’s not hard to hear it as a logical peak of Mark’s practice in this mode, solo and with SND, as much as a springboard for Gábor’s future work, while also catalysing a new wave of operators ranging from Rian Treanor to Kindohm, Kirk Barley’s Church Andrews, and Rhyw, who’ve all harnessed these sort of energies to their respective wills. No doubt the tunes still scare the shit out of DJs with their spasmodic flux, but brave cnuts will recognise the genius on show and let instinct kick in, finding proper club shockers in the slippery 2.1 step whorl of ‘Track 2’ and the scudding dancehall accelerationism of ‘Track 6’, while advanced adventurers will get theirs in the greased straightjacket laser-intensity of ‘Track 7’ or the devilish dexterities of its closing 12 minute zinger. It’s all just blindingly strong stuff for insatiable ravers and computer music neeks alike, properly future-proofed by its makers’ unyielding tenacity and visionary ingenuity.

Rian Treanor re-imagines the intersection of club culture, experimental art and computer music with ‘A Rational Tangle’, his debut quartet of glass-cut, 150bpm hyperprisms for The Death of Rave.

Galvanising and accelerating garage and techno with cuttingly crisp tonal diction and pointillist percussive palette, ‘A Rational Tangle’ demonstrates Treanor’s adroit and finely-nurtured rhythmelodic instincts through a quicksilver syntax of kerned, polychromatic 2-step patterns and whipsmart, emotive jit music.

Functionally titled A1 thru B2, the EP’s four tracks vacillate ping-pong ballistics and recursive melodic motifs constructed in Max/MSP, dancing from pendulous, aerobic minimalism to taut, synthetic tabla grooves with grid melting nous, whilst also taking in gamelan-esque hypeR&B through wormholes of smeared and curdled harmonics, plus one dead lush section of Detroit-via-Yorkshire styled hi-tech funk.

The production is stainlessly dry and future-proof whilst his arrangements are considerately efficient, yet it’s all blessed with a pop or ‘floor-ready turn of phrase that reveals new kinks, fills and twysts with each return listen.

Whichever angle you view it from ‘A Rational Tangle’ forms a rewarding introduction to the work of a very promising and distinct new voice in electronic music.

Rian Treanor (b. 1988) is an artist and producer based in the North of the UK. His practice references the dynamic cut-ups of Fluxus and Dada as much as UK dance music to present an insightful and compelling musical world of interlocking and fractured components. He has formerly studied with Lupo at Berlin’s Dubplates & Mastering, besides years spent running the Enjoy artspace in Leeds.

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