(05.05.06) Last August a friend of mine called me from Berlin, asking if I would have liked some hard to find records, since he was in a nice underground store. After a while I replied: Wasteland – October, and after another five minutes he got a copy for me. But after that moment, my friend regularly forgot to give me my CD until March. One of the reasons was that October was spotted by another friend of mine, who writes on several music magazines, and who wanted to put her greedy hands on it. “It’s a wicked record!!!” she told me. Of course it’s is wicked. I knew since I grabbed the previous Amen Fire release and listened to some October clips online. Obviously somebody labelled it grime, but only because it was 2005: Amen Fire had the same vibes, but it was long before anyone heard that infamous g word.
The main influence on both albums is hip-hop, backed with deep roots in jungle and hardcore from DJ Scud’s side, and dub from I-Sound’s side. It’s dark, groovy, noisy and dirty, so it’s music that could be juxtaposed to dub-step, but when you hear tunes like “Wintermission” you know it’s a different story, it’s more like an instrumental Dälek track, disturbed by gritty industrial noises. Metallic shrieking that comes back in “Industrial Injury” with the additional fierceness of distorted guitars, but probably the most angry moment is “Flash Point,” where hardcore raw bass literally scrapes off the paint from the walls. On a dub-step tip there’s “Saturation,” with the right mixture of dub rhythms and junglist synths allows a mix with some of the more stuff, like Vex’d or Search and Destroy. The entire record is pervaded by this opposition between subaudible bass and stepping beats on one side, and unnerving, abrasive bursts of high frequency noises. The final striking contrast is “In Your Sleep” where, after a synthetic melody taken directly from a ’92 jungle/house tune, suddenly comes in a joyful sitar wiping out all the menacing clouds of the previous eight tracks. October is deep like an abyss, it doesn’t really matter if you’re up to date with the latest trends in underground dance music or not, everybody should check this much under-appreciated project, more hip-hop should sound like this.
October is out now on Transparent.
