The year has seen a stream of bold outings from Samurai Music‘s experimental d’n’b arm, Samurai Horo–the likes of ASC, Fis, Synth Sense, Ena, and Pact Infernal lately joined by Ancestral Voices and Fenton, below.
Liam Blackburn, aka Indigo/half Akkord (with Synkro), re-orients his template from post-d’n’b towards ambient and tribal ethno-experiment for new project Ancestral Voices. Samurai’s blurb has Night Of Visions inspired by experience in the Amazon, ‘loaded with a taut energy that whispers tales of shamanism and transformative life experiences,’ endowed with ‘mystical atmosphere.’ This ‘mystical’ aspect, though, is not of the authentic kind, though it does eschew ethno-ambient stereotype, rather a construct with a certain verisimilitude, mediated through a slew of creaks, drones, eerie tones, tribal chants, choirs, and post-industrial tropes with careful choreography of the sound space: chords yawn abyssally, high end quivers with translucent spectral timbres, evaporating as they materialize. The inner air prickles with atmospheric density, drips with queasy humidity, ripples with waves of dread and ecstasis. The blurb points to the ‘distinct resonances of his musical heritage flowing through a more mature filter.’ Between Techno’s Outer Limits and post-dubstep perimeters, tribal drum vectors and sub-low flow intersect with ineffable electro-acoustic in-betweens. Shakers stir, strange overtones, sonorous metal plates, claps and plumes of woodwind and voice drift sky-wards; tension, suspension, atavistic stirring, summoned by the soft insistence of AV’s tech-patter–bass hum and electronic thrum, like tectonic plate shifts, kicking up tonal dust. Compelling, though, if it is a new trail, it’s less blazed than lightly singed. It is rather new skin for the old ceremony. Lateral thinking–if unlikely–reference is Steve Roach (or, closer to home, Robert Logan): what a Fever Dreams or a Forgotten Gods (or an Inscape?) did for New Age-space music adepts Night Of Visions does for post-Rinse FM Nu-Edge spirit-chasers.
Another intriguing take on post-d’n’b electronica is to be found in 0096 from Fenton. There’s next to nowt out there about this shady customer other than that Samurai boss Geoff Wright (Presha) had apparently been trying to release him for two years (interview here), and that this oblique debut 12″ contains some of the very first Grey Area material produced. It’s a potent brew of distinctive sounding experimental electronica (shorthand) loosely tied to experimental techno while integrating other forms, notably a bleak, wilfully knackered post-d’n’b strain. The tracks have a marked shimmy and rhythmic suture pulling towards and away from dubstep with a strange atmospheric pressure–a dank clank in a murk of sonic effluent in which club functionality seems less salient than mood—more ‘Ambient’ than ‘Dance,’ if you like your genre tags big and dumb. Groove as texture rather than booty: bass half-looms half-skulks as vague slow-mo shapeshifting rumble (“Einmarkt”); drums come on like some scuffed and skewed Satanic boogie riven with click’n’cut sample squiggle (“Fibres”); glacial dub done at-a-remove, barely in motion, let alone kinetic (“Loom”). Only the title track hints at d’n’b, though here bpms, less hyper-speed, wobble, swing, and skip. 0096 floats in and out woozily like episodic memories from a sunken dance party on an abandoned houseboat.
Night of Visions is available on Samurai Horo. 0096 is also available on Samurai Horo.
