A brooding bricolage of jungle and rave dérive pressed into a prickly post-paradigm.
Industrial plumes continue to cloud current techno and related—labels like Blackest Ever Black and Opal Tapes, producers like Shifted and Powell—the headf*ck of these bleak strands of Electronic [disem]Body[ed] Music finding favor with their stripped back kick/jack causing a commotion. In parallel Rainer Veil found another sound from a different floor in New Brutalism, a brooding bricolage of jungle and rave dérive pressed into a prickly post-paradigm. A year on from first episode, Struck, Liam Morley and Dan Valentine’s second installment for Modern Love mines ‘blocky source material’ to forge a sound that packs both kinetic and affective punch. It’s Dance, Jim, But Not As We Know It-doused in dry ice, constructed in cold concrete.
A product of their Northern environment, artwork of Preston Bus station alluding to roots—a rave heritage (cf. Leckey’s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore) seen as if through a glass darkly at two decades remove. Disassembled and layered up—the sort of fragmented narrative emblematic of the Now Age, with its embedding of the past inside the present. A spatio-temporal miasma of sound and vision obscured, deconstructed and abstracted, taken apart and processed, shifting mood and meaning. A subculture’s habitus remote-viewed out-of-body or from a club-corner comedown. “UK Will Not Survive” captures that feeling with its tape-saturated layers of wistful vocal, woody 2-step and junglist broad bass smears, apparently ‘a comment on the corruption of our liberal society. The internet gives this false impression of freedom which in reality is looking a bit fragile...’ “Three Day Jag” distils the introspective hedonism of 90s UK hardcore. Closing number “Run Out” nods to grey building sites and strobe-lit clubs alike, channeling diffuse field recordings and half-heard breaks somewhere between heartbreak and hooded-eyed ennui.
Between concrete Brutalism and Rainer Veil? Only connect (and see below): dissonance between ideation and realization emerging as post-war social housing utopia hit the North—design for living dysfunctioning, lost in translation. Rainer Veil view a vector in UK dance forms like Jungle and Hardcore as resonating with this semiosis—reinforced by these concrete settings being the source of much of the music. ‘When I first listened to My Bloody Valentine, one of the things that got me was that it had this ambivalence. This knot in the stomach feeling it gives you. I think that’s a feeling you get in jungle a lot too.’ (Dan, Rainer Veil) So it’s more like Lee Gamble meeting Kevin Shields than Burial vs. Goldie–abstract form and texture rather than tower block. Rainer Veil plot a line between visual brutalism and harmonic bruitism via a new North-Western post-everything hybrid. Last word to the lads: ‘Brutalist architecture was constructed from poured concrete, which is left rough and raw so that you can still see the impression of the wooden frame. It’s about seeing the materials as they are. Not beautifying things. So whatever sound source or machines, we’re using we try to bring out their idiosyncrasies. Rather than seeing things as flaws, we see them as positives.’ (Rainer Veil)
New Brutalism is available on Modern Love. [Vinyl| MP3]
