Robert Logan is no tourist, but an adventurer who is unafraid to get close to the local flora and fauna wherever his music takes him.
From the wail of ancient horns to electroacoustic scrapes and hisses
Brutalist is the latest release from the prodigious, enigmatic and brilliant Robert Logan. Logan’s worked in the past with such luminaries as Brian Eno, Steve Roach, Grace Jones, Morcheeba, and John Grant to name but a few. His style blends classical, experimental, and electronic styles in a blend best called “orchestral mycopunk,” in which he mixes traditional music theory into the mechanics of composition while at the same time keeping a very earthy, organic and chthonic aspect to his works. From this he’s created a masterpiece from the tracks featured in his forthcoming Slowfoot album Brutalist.
The entire album bristles with an irritable, irascible organic menace while holding these complex song structures together. Imagine weeds slowly cracking open the concrete foundation of a bunker and you will find the same process at work. Every track travels widely across the musical spectrum from the wail of ancient horns to electroacoustic scrapes and hisses.
“Microstates” opens as a tentative, tottering experiment in Berlin techno meeting the harsher manipulation of musique concrète; a sampled human voice at first seems like an oafish outburst that over time evolves into the last human bleat in a landscape filled with machines. “Big Knives” works bell tones, reverb and a tribal beat into an invocation of sound and surface dynamics. “The Dead Hand” recalls works by Mos Def or Massive Attack yet there’s an incipient foreboding to it where you feel it in the darkness around the corner but will never be prepared for what comes. “Black Mamba” works with metallic gamelan rhythms, swarthy, swooping bass drones, and punching drums into a mantra for the machines. “Shifta” brings a loping, hip-hop groove to a mix of reverb-drenched shifting tones and mysterious background warbles. “A Sheep in Wolf’s Clothing” resembles a dreamscape, bell echoing drunkenly over canyons of reverb soaked drones like the final echoes of a dying civilization.
Brutalist is a twenty-four track album that forms a powerfully organic collection; bridging the gap between the organic and the manufactured world, man and nature, and man and machine. Too often as an artist grows they’ll explore newer styles and trends, becoming a musical tourist while dipping their toes into deep and unknown waters with middling success. Robert Logan is no tourist, but an adventurer who is unafraid to get close to the local flora and fauna wherever his music takes him. As a result, Brutalist is easily in my top 10 albums of 2024 (while its release is set of early January of 2025) at first listen and a welcome addition to Robert Logan’s already impressive discography.
Brutalist is available on Slowfoot January 10, 2025. [Bandcamp]
