Label: Soleilmoon Format: CD
Structured around bursts of wheezing Drum & Bass breakbeats, Nigel Ayers‘ latest missive from the borderlands of music broadcasts at a frequency attuned to a zeitgeist-surfing mix of attenuated rhythms, (implied) anti-monarchism and community space travel. All this and an origami sleeve which builds into a peculiar design (instructions enclosed) and Futurist Antiquarianism makes for a rounded album which develops Nocturnal Emissions‘ edgy sound into chilling directions.
Not nearly dance-friendly enough to get the average drumandbasshead going for more than about a quarter of its length, tracks like “Though Aeons Break” mixes sampled brass with metallic-tasting abstraction until the solution dissolves; spacing out the rhythmic moments this way distances Futurist… from genre-categorization quite nicely, allowing a far more organic feel than if the beats had been left to dominate. Instead, the looped breaks are set upon with production processes old and new, liquefying or distorting to match the mood; likewise no shuffling undertow is left unaffected. Storey is in his element making the sounds and rhythms squirm, dragging the listener from one state to another and then switching tone again; the album is slow, frenetic or apprehensive by turns, reaching some kind of apogee on the dub miasma “Shetani”.
With this much spooky dissonance going on, there can be some kind of crossover into the darker side of Drum & Bass found here, much as the recent output of The Third Eye Foundation has done though in quite different style. The spine-tingling tones deployed during some tracks can become quite disturbing, as can the operatic samples and unpleasantly bodily ones, and the tendency for rhythms to disappear or melt into one another makes for a more unnerving experience in this case. Even the brighter sounds make demands on the inner ear, as “Netshaker” amply demonstrates, and there’s little comfort to be found among the slower drifts of scrambled sound. Never really quite satisfying, but probably not intended to be either, Futurist Antiquarianism can be as baffling as it can be evasively unsettling. Strange forces are at work, to mysterious ends.
-Freq1C-
