[Punch Drunk]

Clubs are busy, distracting places meant for dancing and high energy fun — not exactly conducive to focusing on the details of music. Conversely, home listening allows you to drink in all of those rich details but it’s not exactly the best place for cutting loose, sober, to bass-heavy stompers. When listening to Peverelist’s “Better Ways of Living,” my stereo’s volume must have been set on a light, “Hey I’m trying to write here!” notch at first which left the the record feeling very cold and sparse. The louder I cranked the system, the deeper and more nuanced it became. Perhaps that’s an obvious outcome, but it got me thinking about intent vs. location in music made for the dance floor. Peverelist is known for straddling two sides of club music, dubstep and techno. On this new 12″ for his label Punch Drunk, he’s also exploring two sides of listening situations.

With “Better Ways of Living,” a normal listening volume fails to bring out the rich low-end and leaves the oft-kilter drums of the intro feel lonely and awkward. However, dial up the decibals a bit and you’re confronted with shaking, thunderous percussion. Likewise, the sliding synth is almost unknown until the song is given some sound system oomph. It makes for a multi-layered and dimensional song conducive for both home listening and for the club. The flipside, “Fighting Without Fighting” is perhaps the stronger of the two tracks, even though it has many similarities with it’s other half. The percussion is steady, rapid-fire and ensconced in thick bass. There is, however, a much more dub influenced aesthetic at work here, where percussion and melody alike are daubed in healthy amounts of delay, which makes them float in between the frequency extremes of the low throb of the rhythm and the sing-song pitch of the melody. The deep levels of echoing mid-range are something you would feel in a club if not register between the ears. At home, these details get climb inside and turn the track into an environmental element. On both sides of this 12,” Peverelist has created music that can thrive in two very different locales with exceptional results in both.