More interested in ambience, texture and analog synthetic techniques than in creating DJ fodder, Rashim eschews the dancefloor imperative and its associated DJ-appeasing 12″ fetishism, emancipating techno from the domain of electronic body music, moving the zone of inquiry up from the floor to the doors of perception to engage with mind-body dualism.
The last few years have seen a surge in Swedish Techno fertility, with the likes of Skudge, Shxcxchcxsh, and lately a bigger buzz building below from Abdulla Rashim. Since 2011, via his own his own eponymous imprint, under a cloak of constructed anonymity, the shadowy Swede has brought forth a strangely infectious strain of atmospheric techno inflected with Ethiopian motifs, followed by EPs and remixes on the likes of Prologue, Semantica (here and here) and Studio Barnhus. More recently he colluded with Nordic kindred spirits, Varg and Korridor to launch the Northern Electronics label, through which a debut album, Unanimity, is now issued.
Rashim has always tended toward a two-pronged attack of atmosphere and rhythm, though more vertically-colored than horizontally-inclined. Unanimity prods and nudges the style template further towards the ambient drone and sound design influences increasingly drawn out over the series of 12″s—from Asayita to Aksum. The album format often viewed as problematic for Techno works here as atmospheres are given space to breathe and build—a setting in which Rashim can explore a more stratified timbral palette—the grain of the voice, so to speak. From the opening “Under A Wasted Sky” they are more clearly foregrounded, beats being more of a gesture to dynamic motion than kinesis-seeking devices, basslines seldom ranging beyond a functional pitch, deeper layering lending a certain oceanic feeling lacking in the more obvious practitioners of the scene and he(a)rd of peddlers of variants of ‘deep’ and ‘meditative’ techno. Take the Italian headf**k school—see Dino Sabatini, Giorgio Gigli, and Claudio PRC—and the Spanish chapter of dark-hued thumpers like Svreca, Oscar Mulero, and Exium. All tend to converge in a caliginous submersive sound architecture, a cyclical hyp-gnosis with which Rashim is on the surface aligned, though more deeply distinct from–soundings made without those artists’ chthonic sub-bass swells or maxed-out reverb murk, perceptual focus clearer and more present in the Swede’s polyrhythmic mesmerism, pieces like “No God” and “Path Inwards” mood-swinging through spaces between Dozzy’s up-mobility and a Downwards spiral.
In sum, the odd ambient interlude aside, Unanimity loops rhythmic psycho-active hums into feverish faux-tribal mantras, vectors traveling deeper along those shaman’s paths. More interested in ambience, texture and analog synthetic techniques than in creating DJ fodder, Rashim eschews the dancefloor imperative and its associated DJ-appeasing 12″ fetishism, emancipating techno from the domain of electronic body music, moving the zone of inquiry up from the floor to the doors of perception to engage with mind-body dualism.
Unanimity is out now on Northern Electronics.
