Anyone with a penchant for aggressive, dense, anarchic electronic music with ridiculously heavy bass sounds produced with technical aplomb should find Filthy Pleasures by Charly Linch a very worthwhile acquisition indeed.
[Soundcloud page] Charly Linch is a Breakcore artist, and according to his website “[he] is Coen from Dordrecht, Netherlands.” Whether this means his real name is Coen I’ve no idea, it would seem a bit odd to invent the name Charly Linch for yourself though, but I suppose stranger things have happened. I have to admit that I don’t know anything about Charly Linch and there is scant information available, and what there is consists of several internet pages all with exactly the same few paragraphs of text. Not that it matters, this is about the music after all.
Filthy Pleasures is a full length album on the Mindtrick record label, available on CD and digital formats. It is hard hitting aggressive electronic music that will probably be labelled as breakcore, but which isn’t entirely accurately described by said labelling. The record, whilst definitely within the realm of breakcore displays influences from drum and bass, jungle, dubstep and hip-hop among others. In fact, there is a bassline on the first track – “Choke” – which reminds me so strongly of the classic club DnB track “Crank” by Noisia, that it’s hard to get the thought of it out of my mind. Much attention has been paid to the quality of sounds on this album, and the production of the tracks is tight. Breakcore is a very difficult genre to do well, with many artists falling for the trap of simply banging out a stream of harsh sounds at a fast tempo and making what I’ve come to think of as lazycore. To produce really good stuff, you have to pay attention to all the details in the music, and this is no mean feat.
I’m glad to say this album falls into the really good category. An easy test is to play the album and see how often you feel the urge to skip to the next song. A lazily produced breakcore album can induce this urge all too often. Filthy Pleasures engaged me immediately, and from the first track I was making that face to indicate that something is particularly unexpected or good, or daunting. For example, watching a Moto X rider doing a backflip over a bus, or staring at the open door of an airplane you are about to jump out of – you know the look, cheeks puffed out in disbelief, eyes narrowed with a slight shaking motion of the head. Well, that was the face I was making. The heaviness of the bass sounds, and the denseness and intricacy of the programming reminds me a bit of Enduser. That’s not something I say lightly, Enduser is one of my favorite producers, and is the benchmark for complicated fast aggressive drum programming coupled with dark brooding atmospheres.
This album is one of the better works of this style that I’ve come across in recent years. There is real atmosphere and mood conveyed in places, something often lacking in this genre. The amount of work that must have gone into all that micro-programming is mind boggling. I’m not too keen on all the porn film samples (I assume that’s what they are, the alternative is that he has been hiding in brothels with a microphone and a recording device, and frankly, that’s a bit grim!), but maybe he’s trying to communicate something via the medium of contrived coital sounds. Anyway, that aside, this is a very good album. Anyone with a penchant for aggressive, dense, anarchic electronic music with ridiculously heavy bass sounds produced with technical aplomb should find Filthy Pleasures by Charly Linch a very worthwhile acquisition indeed.
Filthy Pleasures is out now on Mindtrick. [Soundcloud page]
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