Filled with a brooding sense of immanent menace, Dren‘s Time And Form LP feels essential, heavy, as if built from various elemental forces and carved into platonic solids.
While the eight tracks might bear some initial resemblance to techno and industrial electronic music, there’s also a tremendously heavy bass presence that rumbles weightily at the low end, providing a solid bedrock on which the duo of Natt and Akton layer their various disconcerting concoctions. Whether these are the sounds of ritual body music, replete with choral samples and what sounds uncannily like body parts being reconfigured in real time, or the sequencing of digital and other instruments, Dren judge most moments on Time And Form to perfection.
The body music aspect finds particular expression in a particularly expressive sort of percussive thwack, and it’s hard to determine if there are real, sampled or cunningly modelled drums at play here (if it matters). It’s present in “Shadow Of The Sun”, whose more obviously synthesized sound sources hover darkly among the densely packed sequences, and while this latter might once have been techno, both tracks recall Test Dept or some kind of electro-mechanical taiko as the rhythms build, while ominous scuttling and smearing tones herald the arrival of some seriously fulsome bass that surges into every available nook and cranny on “I Am A Pilgim”. Quite how immersive this would be on a heavyweight soundsystem is something left for the future to reveal, but the impact is impressive and near-tectonic. The other obvious comparison is to Pan Sonic‘s bowel-trembling oscillator and bass pulsations or Justin Broadrick‘s many and varied electronic identities, and Dren share both’s penchant for a hefty yet crisp kick that hits with pile-driven precision while the surrounds devolve and audibly disintegrate. When the drum and bass break rattles in unexpectedly from somewhere external to the main rhythm on “Vermillion”, its arrival is timed just right, setting matters off at a frenetic tangent that breaks the spell and takes things to another level altogether. Likewise, “Obscuruum” builds up a steady, thudding beat, then splits off into an echoing systematic loop that sounds not so much generically industrial as like actual machinery building something physical and real.If Dren had opted just to make a bass-heavy techno LP or a drum and bass EP, then it would undoubtedly have worked as such – but Time And Form takes time to breathe. The duo wisely let the swell and plangent throes of what could be cello processed into something less recognisable soar over the heaving morass and scurrying rustling fragments of “Form (Way of Perdition)” in an emotive and effective pause for reflection. It’s moments like these, and the scattered buzzing and heaving bass departure of final track “Terminus”, that give Time And Form the proper feel of an album rather than merely a collection of tracks.
-Linus Tossio-
