Linear S Decoded adds more melodic and narrative cues, favoring bruitism over brutalism, while still being one of the more uncompromising Techno works 2014 has thrown up.
The latest LP from shady Swedes SHXCXCHCXSH is strangely accessible—strangely, that is, despite a name (phonetic transcription of a drum pattern?) designed to deter, a public image pre-empting attempts to face the faceless (Google image search returns an amusingly monochrome set), and a take on UK techno trailing industrial and experimental design tropes signalling uneasy listening. The concrete beats of the pair’s previous predilection may still deter, but Linear S Decoded sees them somewhat mellowed, without losing their edge. Taken under the wing of Avian by Head Beak, Guy ‘Shifted’ Brewer, for a first EP in 2012, then an LP, STRGTHS, in 2013, they traded in a Techno template painted black with just a few licks of white swirled in for a sui generis greyscale. Linear S Decoded adds more melodic and narrative cues, favoring bruitism over brutalism, while still being one of the more uncompromising Techno works 2014 has thrown up.
At once more vari-tonal and mood-swinging than the debut’s mono-brow marauding, scoped for a broader harmonic spectrum and more rhythmic twists, Linear S Decoded is a fetid and febrile affair, with affectionate nods to ambient and rave tweaked in amused detachment, non-aligned with a wave of European producers in blackest ever black down among the gloom-fetishizing dead men. There are tortured textures a-plenty and no end of 4-on-the-floor kicks to be had here, but no real punishers. It still operates at the submerged end of the spectrum, primed for club and/or headphone immersion. Witness the eerie ambience of “Entering the S-Cloud,” prelude to the piston pump and machine riffage, whipcrack drums and percussive snap of “Drain This Lord.” The narcotic noir swirl of “Wading Guise” and spiralling swamp stomp of “Helical Dialog,” with the ambient-inflected light-step of “The Roots” and roiling synth flux and distorto-electro of “Elocution” in between. Best of the bunch is the Shed-loaded “The Under Shore,” woozy synths slithering through a flexing breakbeat reduction with a sub-bass that moves liquid through your viscera. Still room for darkside appropriation “This Hmming Raverie” to re-contextualize a hands-in-the-air serrated synth motif down the slippery slope of a Reese bassline before the Dynamo-esque “Sub Mission – The Atlantic Vision” and the queasy Doctor Who-echoing shuffle of the final sardonically titled “Monolithic Conclusion.”
In sum, with Linear-S Decoded SHXCXCHCXSH inject something of the jouissance of ’90s/’00s electronica/IDM into the corrugated concrete of late-modernist Techno. Their’s is a light touch with dark matter, a ludic sensibility that cuts through po-faced pose with perky irreverence. It makes for a rare thing, a coherent techno album—one, moreover, that lets you wallow in muck/murk and not feel dirty next day, rather refreshed (n.b. SHXCXCHCXSH’s “The Under Shore” kicks off Dalliance #9, a recent mix that trended so hard it hit no. 1 in mixcloud’s Dub Techno Trending Chart three days after upload. Big Ups to Me!)
Linear S Decoded is available on Avian.
http://youtu.be/Us8hahxCtYY
