Spirals of blaring noise echo as if chained to the underside of some long-forgotten cistern. A voice, far faraway from regular diction, barks syllables in a harsh, lurching cadence. What stays of normal meter exists solely as a log of managed chaos—fetid, cavernous rhythms that batter a crumbling basis. All of it sounds prepared to interrupt aside. British producer Blawan holds it collectively on “The GL Lights,” the opening monitor of SickElixir. He extracts techno from inside dense strata of mechanized grit, maneuvering by way of sharp edges and switchbacks till the mangled body contorts into a brand new image. The aesthetic is startling; his corroded dance music, steeped in hellish glossolalia, conjures an enormous, violent, and unknowable world.
It hasn’t at all times been like this. When charting his growth, the artist born Jamie Roberts recollects feverish after-school drum follow and a fascination with the metallic shrieks of an industrial mincer that soundtracked work as a maggot farmer in South Yorkshire. In his earliest releases, tidy post-dubstep singles for labels just like the legendary Hessle Audio, this fascination manifested as mechanistic perfection: skeletal grooves dominated by surgically organized percussion. As his expertise grew, his work underwent a sea change. The beats turned noisier, grittier, extra natural, with out compromising the slick preparations. By the point of his first album, 2018’s Moist Will All the time Dry, lots of Roberts’ now-perennial fascinations have been starting to calcify: “Tasser,” as an example, propelled its eroded techno pulse ahead with a throaty digital rasp. A brand new poetics of distortion was taking form.
Seven years on, the leering, all-encompassing grime of SickElixir melds dozens of Roberts’ subsequent discoveries and revelations right into a brutish, unhinged gestalt; its clamorous swagger makes “Tasser” seem like a curio. Tracks groan and caterwaul as if wounded, cataloging an enormous library of scabbed-over synth leads and guttural vocal hooks. The sound rides an uncanny center between the scratchy, live-wire jam classes of Syclops and the kitschy throat-singing augments of Ummet Ozcan. Roberts operates with finesse, discovering a definite place within the combine for every factor in his tapestry. The yo-yoing quantity dynamics in lead single “NOS”—from ruthless, blown-out bass to a clipped whisper—are directly natural and painstakingly contrived, compressing opposed timbres right into a steady, unified eruption.
