Nick Forté :: Enter The Jargon (Schematic Music Co.)

A tough but colorful sideways trip through fragments of contemporary dance styles driven by riffs borrowed from the rave and returned quite broken.

A warm, diffused energy

Nick Forté is a known riff master, from the razor sharp Rorschach to the baseball bat blunt Raspberry Bulbs, his guitar work can be found in the collection of any in-the-know punk or metalhead. Forté’s parallel discography of electronic music has often seemed apart from that and always has a warm, diffused energy. Even on the breakcore infused and completely pissed Young Man’s Disease (Sublight, 2006), the angst is smeared into a cloudly blur. Enter the Jargon, his return to Miami IDM mainstay Schematic, is a tough but colorful sideways trip through fragments of contemporary dance styles driven by riffs borrowed from the rave and returned quite broken.

The album opener, “Koto Destroyer,” sums the album up pretty well. A terrorizing gabber kick knocks up against a stiff and brittle approximation of a break before it’s met with a few out-of-meter e-koto lines. These halted and thrown around in a familiar IDM style but no less enjoyable for it. “Whipped Up” similarly takes a few disparate elements and tumbles them around until it sounds like a Carl Stone, Michael Mayer and Ed Banger Records collab. That bold excessiveness is the rule. Tracks like “Crimp Bliss” and “Rose Bones” might start from a calmer place, but within a minute percussion runs off while the rest of the track has reassemble to join it.

This kind of unsteadyness sets Enter The Jargon away from other rave informed experimentalism. Acts like EVOL, SND and Lorenzo Senni seem intent on zeroing in on the micro-elements by using repetition and editing to reveal rhythmic and timbral complexity inherent. Forté seems more intent on translating the energy of electronic dance music into something more personal and rushing while crafting melodies and hooks as catchy as his riff-work. And while there’s precedent of dense IDM that shows it roots and fondness for the dancefloor, Autechre’s sly nods towards hip-hop and bleep being one, Forte’s reference points seem more contemporary and frankly less in-vogue—gabber, hardstyle, and hardcore, occasionally classed up with some UK garage swing. It’s wild, unruly music that will do your head in. Which is the point.

Enter The Jargon is available on Schematic.