(05.25.08) Pridon (Petros Voudouris) makes self-declared “freestyle” electronic music. It sounds more adventurous than it actually is, for in mediating between the term’s constituents, the ‘free’ is very much subject to the ‘style.’ Freedom here is confined to ranging between a set of genre templates, predominantly Detroit/minimal techno, ambient, electro, and hip hop. Now, there’s nothing wrong with stylism, in fact it might be said that an overview of popular electronic music from the ’90s to the ’00s would show it to have grown increasingly stylised – in the sense of elevating form over content, container over contained, gesture over action. Artists now find their music trailed only partly by programmatic statements and musicological descriptions, increasingly reliant on pre-packaged designators, like “techno” or “electro” or “ambient,” or more likely some buzzphrase-generated hybrid combining several sub-genre exponents. It’s not that there are no gains from the March of Stylism. When postmodernism’s freeplay of forms is given its head in any artistic mode (cf. film, literature, visual art), there is opportunity in the air for heady indulgence. The downside is that forms, in being thus privileged, get more self-conscious, turning in on themselves, becoming less vibrant. More liquid crystal display, less cathode ray, means arguably a better resolved but ultimately less engaging picture.
Which preamble is intended to provide a setting for critique of Pridon’s latest release, Apnea Eina. Following on debut full-length, Health Food Scroll, and recent EP, New Steine, Greece-Brighton shuttler Voudouris has developed into an accomplished remaker and remodeller in the paradigm of stylism outlined above. A now more than workmanlike shifter of sonic scenery with a certain brio, operating in zones somewhere between the electro-techno axis of Autechre Mk.I (see “Gin” and “Fumble”) and the ambient-hiphop ambit of ‘classic’ BoC (see “Flask Bordon” and “Keweed”), with ventures into Rephlex territory of d’n’b-cum-breakcore (“Gin” and “Lithos”). Apnea Eina in fact situates itself round about where labels like Toytronic, then Ai, initially seemed to be heading a few years back, shaping to carry forward the old Warp torch of electronic listening music and armchair techno, before tailing off (Toytronic) or re-routing (Ai). It emerges as above-par e[c]lectronica, machine funk, and blip hop with a few individual flourishes (like the Afro-highlife colourings on “Sunk”), oozing atmospheric ambiance in that by now over-familiar sci-fi wooze variety of atmo-ambi that will satisfy most IDM-pathizers.
But those looking below surface will be disappointed. Certainly, if you lament Autechre’s (Chiastic) slide into internality post-1996, then you’ll be better off with Apnea Eina than Quaristice for your ‘Ambient-techno’ update. But this association is misleading, for Pridon is no Autechre stalking horse. Instead, with his love for the retro-futurist sound of analogue synthesizers, bleeps and wibbles, washes and wooshes, and big drums and drum machines, it’s more the likes of EU (remember them?), Novel 23, and Ambidextrous who are in Voudouris’s sights. Yes, this is not so much all Greek to me as Russian, in that spirit of affectionate, but still craven, appropriation of UK-tooled styles. Ultimately, the ‘stylist’ can satisfy up to a point, but then the more exacting will be looking for something of the ‘restructuralist’ spirit; the spirit of a Bola, or a Pub, or even a Bitstream – to name but three UK producers who have departed from a tradition. In their case, departure doesn’t stop at the primary stage of taking from it, but crucially extends beyond to taking it on through their own particular endowment. And it is this failing that condemns Apnea Eina to the 2nd class status of a merely diverting pacifier.
Apnea Eina is out now on Low Impedance. [Purchase
