The phrases inked throughout Blawan’s knuckles—KICK DRUM—supply shorthand to the UK producer’s credo: a paean to the life drive that’s rhythm, the heartbeat on the coronary heart of all issues. The center, after all, can be a muscle, and Blawan—actual title Jamie Roberts—has spent the previous 13 years sculpting percussion with a boxer’s obsessive focus. His drums (typically, his tracks are nothing however drums) are large, bruising issues, swollen with ailing will and latent violence. Behind each beat lies the specter of a knockout blow.
However Blawan’s newest EP, the thrilling and bewildering Dismantled Into Juice, complicates issues. It is without doubt one of the heaviest data of his catalog, but these kick drums are virtually nowhere to be discovered. Relatively than the elegant symmetry of the four-on-the-floor, the report evokes a maelstrom of distributed violence. Rhythm as matrix, rhythm as mesh; a sticky net of mayhem bobbing within the breeze, snaring every part that comes shut.
Take the opening “Toast.” The vibe is jittery, over-caffeinated; the drums thrash in spasms, fibrillating wildly, kick and snare locked in a vicious shoving match. Paroxysms of rolling toms set up a weird call-and-response sample with gurgling rave stabs, like a machine gun in dialog with a water fountain. Warps within the groove give the impression that the tempo is perpetually rushing and slowing in bursts, like an industrial-strength YKK yanked forwards and backwards throughout battered rows of interlocking tooth. There’s one thing nearly cartoonish concerning the music’s lumbering movement, however the place tracks like Pearson Sound’s “Earwig” or Pangaea’s “Bone Sucka” are spirited and goofy, “Toast” simply sounds deranged.
“Panic” is even heavier, driving a bass-fueled bulldozer that remembers the Bug’s speaker-shredding low finish. This time, Blawan shifts his consideration from rhythm to texture. His drums sound like they’ve been hollowed out by termites; the excessive finish quivers like crinkled cellophane. “Physique Ramen” does much more with the identical broken patina. On the floor, it’s an nearly-conventional mixture of halftime beat and Knife-like trance arpeggios, however the actual motion is within the sandpapery floor, the gravelly pocks within the varnish. Regardless of the sound design’s cataclysmic crunch, there’s a bizarre readability to it—many of the frequencies have been sucked out of the mixdown, leaving pockets of extreme highs and crisp mids silhouetted over an ominous, ultra-low throb.
The textural fuckery extends to the vocals, that are credited to 1 Monstera Black, however sound, of their abrasion and confusion, just like the output of an AI. Swaddling a dulcet chorus within the shut, clammy reverb of a clogged drainpipe, “You Can Construct Me” toggles between sweetly major-key passages and impolite explosions of atonal bluster. Everybody is aware of that Cocteau Twins signify the apotheosis of dream pop, however what this monitor presupposes is, possibly they had been truly an industrial sludge band?
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