(October 2009) With a slew of solid 12″s built up over their half-decade plus of operation, it’s surprising to find Pendle Coven the late-delivery boys of the Mancunian mafia at Modern Love (cf. Claro Intelecto, Andy Stott) album-wise. In fact, selections from five of those eight EPs make up the main body of Self Assessment, augmented by six new/unreleased tracks (and a secret bonus). Though Miles Whittaker and Gary Howell have ranged stylistically over ’90s hardcore, electro, warehouse minimal, IDM, breakbeat, and dubstep, even the odd bit of ambient drone, Self Assessment cleaves largely to a Berlin-Detroit minimal-techno-dub space. In a sense, coordinates for this have already been established by Echospace’s The Coldest Season, Claro Intelecto’s Warehouse Sessions and Andy Stott’s Unknown Exception, plotting the triangle of which will adumbrate Self Assessment’s ambit of operations. This is not so much a conventional album as a kind of self-compiling mix with track intervals, so clearly focused is it on homogeneity.
“Aged Drone”‘s jackplug-buzz treated guitar sketch and the banger “Exigen” act as miles-apart bookends, the former finding common ground between Aidan Baker and Deepchord, the latter Berlin-inspired with steepling chord crescendos. In between there’s a good deal of solid dub tech and bass action. The crepuscular insistence of “IAMNOMAN,” the fractured shuddering proto-dubstep of “Unit 6” swimming in echo-aquatics, and the jacked-up kick of “Modern Mode” find felicitous balance between beats and atmosphere. The more ambiently textured “Chord Calculus” is the standout of the new offerings, beautously burbling and divinely drizzled, with a hypnagogue kick-throb keeping its celestial ambitions grounded. The roiling reverberations of “Optimal” come from a distant Detroit via Didsbury, while the bassbin-bothering “MVO Chamber” hosts a welter of waves breaking over Burnage all the way from Berlin. Long-haulers will find reward in an untitled sketch secreted at the CD’s end, modal-drone analogue doodling in reflective didgeridoo-cum-overtone wanderings whose meditative leanings are irrupted into by arcade game snipings from its borders.
Self Assessment highlights Pendle Coven’s capacity to animate their chosen sub-genre forms with vibrancy and character, often leaving spaces empty, only to fill them with deep draughts of Manc-made dolefulness and post-echoic grit, inkily lingering. Where some prefer to drift on and on in white clouds of fluffy efflatus, theirs are the dark plumes that spread, strangely compelling, over a grim-up-North of factory fug and grey remembered hills.
Self Assessment is out now on Modern Love. [Listen / Purchase]
