Gosub scorches his rhythms with soldering iron precision whilst employing the darkened unemotional side of machines to produce a clean and sleek sound. Dissociation, alienation, the relentless march of a digital age where technology and man are fused into one.
Electro is a style that has always enjoyed wrapping itself in mystery. Underground Resistance, Dopplereffekt and Drexciya, to name but a few, shrouded their themselves in stark mantras, pseudo science rhetoric and even mythology. Shad T. Scott aka Gosub is another artist who, despite releasing for well over a decade, still plays his cards close to his chest. The Isophlux founder started his career with IDM inspired electronics but soon moved onto the colder and more clinical codes of his machines. Under this moniker, Scott has sent his transmissions to earth on labels like Frustrated Funk, Solar One and Transient Force. Gosub returns to Abstract Forms, last visited in 2011, with a new 12”: Mirror Watcher.
The title track steals into being with measured beats and breathy samples. The track struts with voyeuristic tendencies and a mechanical fetish. “Phase Space” maintains the clipped cruelty, snipping snares sent into the stratosphere. “Search Virus” slows the aggression, plinks of circuitry blended with brooding melodies. Throughout the EP Gosub builds fragile cylinders of future echoes, all being steeped in distanced undercurrents of separation. The flip sees Scott in cerebral mode. Shifting space spirals drifting into beats and synth before the broader tones of “Galaxy Ghost” invade with lofty lines and blackened vocals. The close sees Scott enter subdued assault mode. BPMs rise whilst harmonies pitch into the Ambient for a speed and wind filled finale.
Electro can take many forms. Some take breakbeat as the starting point, other warm melodies. For others it is the chilling inhuman brand of the sound, one pioneered by the likes of Dopplereffekt. Mirror Watcher comes from this place. Gosub scorches his rhythms with soldering iron precision whilst employing the darkened unemotional side of machines to produce a clean and sleek sound. Dissociation, alienation, the relentless march of a digital age where technology and man are fused into one; this is the picture that Scott paints with 101s and 808s.
Mirror Watcher is available on Abstract Forms. [Release page]
