Label: Caciocavallo Format: 2CD
As might be expected, Robin Storey‘s take on drum & bass is somehwat denser than the usual clatter of hyperspeed breaks, rolllllls and rewinds. Instead, the two discs of Cold War Drum ‘n’ Bass are crammed with unfurling meditations in rhythm and texture, linked by the ideas of paranoia and mutually assured destruction of a childhood surrounded by the hardware and attitudes of unfought warfare. Thus the album is suitably tense, with beats trundling in production lines of menace, liberally sprinkled with restrained crackles, undead vocal trills, ghosted reflections of uniformed dances and windswept airbase hoedowns past and curled-up echoes which step slowly at their own shuffling pace.
Two discs of heavyweight reflections on an era that’s not so far away as it seems in the 21st Century’s New World Ordure could become dreary and depressing, but given time to breathe and expand, this album can soon become enveloping. Rapoon is one of those names which has associations all its own; hovering disquiet, eerie voiceless choral ambience, discomforting electronic expressionism. There is a preference for avoidance of quick release of tension in the breakbeats and bass, which take their own time to the drones and concrète percussion rather than in the fire of sampler tricknology demonstrations. That the low end is visited sparingly, as found on the miasmic “Lunarists In The Jungle” and under the tripping rimshot scatters of “Exactly”, makes for a record where the press of air from bulging speakers is more of a surprise than a rush. Similar dissonances greet the clattery loops of “Fixated” or infect the wheezing break which underpins the creakily awry swelling chords of “Almost, Still”. Like Muslimgauze, Storey dissectects the radio aether for his atmospherics and selects suitable percussive sounds with care, except here the culture being dissected is more often closer at hand in space if not time.
Perhaps it’s unfair to mention what Cold War Drum ‘n’ Bass isn’t, but one thing it doesn’t share with most recordings which offer up that generic description is the funk in any great quantity. The grooves here are of an altogether different variety, and are found in the hypnotic roll of a syncopated sampled beat rather than in the danceable realms – there’s way too much circling ambiguity going on for shaking hips to, though “A Desert Wind” does lurch to an echo-drenched hiphop rhythm. As with The Third Eye Foundation‘s dread psychedelic decadence, there is much more in the rhythms and tones and processed choirs to warp the head than stimulate the body on this album. Shivery and shimmering, and occasionally disquieting too, Cold War… reflects its subject matter rather well in the bursts of motion and tension scattered among the long passages of uncertain loops, distressed vocal harmonies and hesitant, hair-trigger stillness.
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