(05.14.07) Patscan is Pat Hime, a South East Londoner now resident in Brighton, where fledgeling label Concrete Plastic is based, and Muddled Up is a mélange of acidic electro wibble and post-AFX skitter in a noughties video-game sound design world that gets progressively more interesting as its 4 tracks spool out. The initial “Tiki Champer” and “Tuna Steak Break” are articulated in a voice pledging allegiance to (and rampant derivation from) early-mid 90s Brit IDioM. Twitchily hyperactive but no pulse-racing. On “Meloncolonies,” though, Patscan changes the sub-genre template, playing around instead with some odd stagger-shuffle rhythms and a bunch of percussive taps, pings and clatters, which fail to make sense until from the somewhat evacuated mid-ground Hime slowly reels out a doleful I Am An Autechrist statement of extended melodicism on a mixture of toytown music box tinkle and almost Black Dog Bytes chordal abstraction over what has become a nano-breakcore helter-skelter ride. There is fecundity also in the closing “Compressed Apples,” a cross between schaffel-beat and muted stomp that lets echoing slivers slide over its surface before ceding to a dub-daze of peculiar soft noise balletics, finished in a twilit chord-glaze comforting as a Bola soup or a Plaid wrap. Ends abruptly, though, just as interest is piqued. Report card reads: shows promise; must try harder.
Concrete Plastic’s other digital-only 4-tracker, Northern Cedar, contains two tracks from Seattle-ite Chris Jones’s July-released Yard full-length, Deciduous Flood Plains. “Pacquet” is a noise-laden acidic sequencer-driven bad boy with a 4-onthefloor kick regimen that’s positively jackbooted, allied to a grainy speed-headache drone. Minimal only in terms of variation, not demeanour, it could even be RDJ moonlighting on a techno template, though with nods to Porter Ricks, as well as Monolake’s recent Alaska 12″. “Canopy” is more dubbed out and subtle, with a walking-stalking bassline, intriguing almost trumpet-like mid-high range sustains, and a plethora of pointilistic sub-pops and criss-cross skatter-patter gradually mounting into an off-beat march-shuffle, and eventually setting up a parallel off-beat slave to the master rhythm that unchains itself from it in that peculiar quasi-Reichian phase-shifting fixation of hardcore techno. As satisfyingly developed and arranged a piece as its successor is indelicate and clod-hopping. A rough cut of dullard tech-primitivism, “Dub Breather” winds down the bpms for more of a slow idiot-stomp, tub-thumping kicks and handclaps on stun, over which rolling echo returns of sci-fi sawtooth resonances are reeled out. It’s big but it’s not clever. The final “Long Rolling Hills” could almost be another artist entirely, and in a sense it is, with Karri O being credited as co-producer. Analogue synth arpeggiations loop out blithely, cycling sunnily over a soft-pedalled 4-square backbeat. A blandly upbeat closure slightly out of keeping with Northern Cedar‘s prevailing gritty tenor. Worth having for that first full-length titillating pair. Or wait for Deciduous Flood Plains to land.
Muddled Up and Northern Cedar are out now on Concrete Plastic. [Purchase]
