[Modern Love]

Over the past 18 months Modern Love have been creeping ever closer to musical epiphany. From Demdike Stare, the Andy Stott mini-albums and solo work from Miles Whittaker, to this debut release from G.H. (Gary Howell, the other half of Pendle Coven), their in-house style has become ever more extreme. This extremity has manifested itself both in tempo range (from slow to very slow) and in the musical conflict brought about by a consuming darkness paired with moments of ethereal deliverance. As such, this EP is an aural gumbo of giddy and seductive complexity; warm, haunting and highly unlikely to be served by any other label.

Opener “Ground” sets an exequial kick to a low pace, while ancient vinyl purposefully crackles and a concave sub cements the mix. It is to Howell’s credit that he can evoke immersive and consuming audio out of such sparse elements. The movement over eight minutes amounts to a scorched earth funeral march — pure Armageddon dub. “Earth” is a slightly brighter affair, referencing old jungle records through the chopped up bass stabs. A spliced soul vocal gives the track some invigorating color, cutting through the gray-scale of the package and taking Modern Love to its most energetic and upbeat in quite some time. “Albedo” again uses static and crackle as a rhythmic device, maintaining an even-handed technoid groove that is clearly influenced by the ghost of techno past. The pads in particular evoke chemical memory of Rhythm & Sound at their most hypnotic, but the bright hi-hat pattern distinguishes it from the murky depths of the A-side.

On the Ground EP, G.H. provides a comprehensive and personal response to the recent Modern Love catalog. Its three tracks exist within the context of the increasingly idiosyncratic space that the imprint seems intent on operating within; a primeval sounding operation that twists the popular mechanics of dance music ever further away from the club. That he has managed to bring more accessible elements to the table without watering down the style is testament to the skill of a producer playing a devastating end game.

[Modern Love]

Earlier this year, Andy Stott released Passed Me By, a mini-LP that confounded popular opinion on his sound. Stott’s prior work tended toward shimmering dub house and dub techno, often distinctive but never especially risky. Passed Me By could feasibly be called dub house or dub techno too, albeit with one major hitch. The record drags semblances of dance rhythms to claustrophobic, murky depths, reducing uptempo tracks to seething, blotchy dirges — in short, it’s Stott moving far, far away from the club. We Stay Together, Stott’s new record, is an able companion to Passed Me By. It’s similarly mired in sludginess, and this indistinctness means it’s also an inconstant experience. Cursory listens to “Bad Wires” suggest the track’s shuffling, somnolent rhythm is rallying around a muted organ tone, like if everything wasn’t so submerged and caked in grit there would be a legitimate hook to hold onto. But listening later under slightly different circumstances, that tone’s marginal pop appeal seems like a happy accident; it flutters off into the mix, hardly fixed at all.

Apart from physical issues like tape decay, it’s odd to think of recordings as unreliable, and obviously these tracks aren’t magically remixing themselves behind your back. Stott’s sound design is such that each track feels contained, and perhaps even more than its predecessor, We Stay Together sounds preoccupied with its sonorous undercurrent. The low-end is so overwhelmingly prominent that what appears above is often wispy and fleeting, an ethereal counter to the rhythms’ bulbous trudge. Although Stott employed similar techniques on Passed Me By, there’s definitely something bleaker about this record. Tracks like “Intermittent” and “New Ground” include overt nods to funk and R&B tropes, the former in its liquid bass line, the latter in a chopped, melancholic female vocal sample. We Stay Together has no such bass lines, and when Stott messes with the (sparse) vocals, the results are creepy: the vocal on “We Stay Together (Part One)” is pitched down so low that it resembles a kind of deaf animal groan, like a bear roaring through plexiglass.

These kinds of garbled sounds abound. “Posers” pans a similarly unintelligible vocal back and forth amid a grim rhythmic rumble, while “Cherry Eye” features creaky snippets of strings and a repeating tone that recalls a nosediving airplane, both sounding utterly swamped by the track’s lurch. “Submission” is a stirring exception to the rule — all beatless, looming atmospherics, it captures a similar forlorn detachedness as pieces by Burial or Demdike Stare. Above all, We Stay Together is commendable for its mutability. It’s clearly a dense record, but its palette — foggier and more autumnal than that of Passed Me By — makes it difficult to pinpoint how, exactly. Repeat listens dredge up new hooks as much as they submerge old ones. If anything is clear, it’s that Stott’s crafted an uncommonly consuming, consistently phantasmagoric effort.

[Modern Love]

Techno has long been a kind of skeleton upon which producers hang their own idiosyncrasies. For some it’s extreme minimalism; for others, it’s shimmering waves of noise and texture. Miles Whittaker’s particular love is seated in deep dub which he’s as half of Pendle Coven and Demdike Stare, as well as under his own MLZ alias. His latest, Facets, for long time home Modern Love, is tellingly published under his own name and represents some of the most personal music he has made. Its four experimental techno tracks shuffle, vibrate and hypnotize in ways that recall of his other projects but forge a very unique sound. I first heard the second track, “Lustre,” on the radio, and it was an acutely singular experience hearing the titanic layers of sounds coming over the airwaves, like they were tunneling through miles of solid rock to get to my ears.

When “Flawed” begins, one could be forgiven for expecting a Demdike Stare-style horror show from its ghostly melody atmosphere, but the shuddering drum beat soon takes over and becomes a track about rhythm rather than that other project’s tribalistic shamanism. Its relentless beat only drops out for seconds at a time, giving way to deeper sonics with each resurgence. The true highlight, though, is the aforementioned “Lustre.” Apparently based on some re-configured material from labelmate Andy Stott, it’s a giant track sure to devastate anyone hearing it over a proper system. Dark and ominous atmospheres coat the low-end while a gritty dub beat acts as the anchor preventing the listener from becoming too lost in it’s hypnotic waves. Whittaker excels at cutting the production just perfectly to keep these elements in balance.

“Primer” is all about the drums, pushing the melody and texture down to serve as background while a drum machine is flipped and manipulated into increasingly intense variations. This is only techno in the loosest sense, being much closer to the African percussion styles than anything else. Closer “On The Fly” is perhaps the most difficult of Facets‘ tracks. Using an makeshift setup of broken drum machines, contact microphones and samplers, Miles let the devices run wild in an organically chaotic mess of rhythm and sound. At times it stutters and falters just when it starts going; other times it grates from lack of progress. This is true experimentalism, though, and songs like this lead to equipment discoveries leading to perfect storms like “Lustre.” When “On The Fly” finally exhausts itself in a sudden stop, the end is jarring but fitting for an EP built on a love of the wonderful accidents that can happen when pushing equipment and music to the edge of beauty. Whether it’s with groups or on his own, Miles seems set to explore that edge for a long time to come.

[Modern Love]

How much can you strip away from something before it’s no longer the thing you started with? Is there some pivot-point at which the shadow of the thing ceases to represent anything at all, becoming not much more than a hazy, amorphous form darker than what surrounds it? The record I’ve had on repeat recently has got me thinking about little else. The thing in question here is house music; the guy with the Exacto knife is Modern Love’s golden boy Andy Stott; and the shivery shadow is Passed Me By, said golden boy’s latest release. Stott — without question one of the most inventive bass music heads around by way of his Millie & Andrea project with Miles Whittaker, not to mention a deeply on-point wrangler of techno under his own name — has twisted and tugged at our perceptions of dance genres before, most recently when he stretched dub textures out like Silly Putty on “Tell Me Anything,” his last solo outing for Modern Love. But what he’s done to house music across the four sides of Passed Me By — and I’m arguing that somewhere inside all this gory throbbing lie six carcasses of straight-up, four-to-the-floor house tunes — constitutes violence against peak time on an order you probably wouldn’t expect out of a producer whose records tend to embrace it. Passed Me By might be dance music shaved down to within an inch of its life, but it’s an inch far too tantalizing to be left for dead.

Where Shackleton — a distant sonic relative, to be sure, but admittedly a good reference point — takes us deep inside ourselves, Andy Stott instead puts us immediately in the present: this ain’t no pre-historical tribal jam; rather, it’s guerrilla fucking warfare. Each track places you on a block where a bomb just went off the moment before your heart’s gotten the message to start racing. The disorientation begins with the woozy “Signature,” a half-minute of gurgling and a necessary pallet-cleanser for what’s to come. The assault starts in earnest with “New Ground,” and it’s difficult to think of a better title for the track: a lonely voice calls out over a recently bombed-out landscape, the only perceptible movement in the track before sinister hi-hats start skittering across its scorched earth in the track’s final third. “North To South” sounds like an air raid might through ears deafened by an overabundance of them. In another producer’s hands, you’d expect the track to feel lifeless, but through the iciest of melodies, Stott creates a nearly anthemic moment, albeit one carried out in slow-motion. “Intermittent” features a soul sample so chopped to smithereens, you wouldn’t have the remotest sense of the source material if Stott didn’t reconstitute it as the track enters its death throes. The only track which might find its way into a DJ set not otherwise made up only of Workshop B-sides, the cavernous “Dark Details,” steps with the swagger and snap of a man who’s just sold his soul to the devil; hear it, and you’re likely to skank your way to the opposite side of the street. To be the darkest transmission of this collection is something of a feat, but “Execution” accomplishes it: excruciatingly slow and brimming with satanic growls, it even out-creeps Stott’s label-mates Demdike Stare.

How strange, then, that the set ends on a note that feels nearly poignant. Heavy and hungover, “Passed Me By” suggests this horror-show may have been little more than an unwise combination of substances. You’re feeling it today, to be certain, but as the sunlight trickles in for the first time in what feels like centuries, you realize how singular a spirit-journey Andy Stott has taken you on. I’m not sure what context these tracks were intended for (other than a moderate-to-severe panic attack), but I have no doubt that they represent a leap forward for someone whose studio chops needed no proving. House music has officially gotten its side blown off, and while the vast majority of adherents to the genre will easily shake this one off, I’m excited to hear from those producers who are truly injured or at the very least traumatized by the experience. I suspect all listeners will be left wondering what happened last night and where this lingering sense of dread is coming from. But we’ll let out a sigh, put on our shades, gladly accept that Bloody Mary, and slide ever so slowly into Monday, hoping all of this was just a deliciously strange dream.

[Modern Love]

That Demdike Stare fill my head with images of the occult and druids should be no surprise. With Ouija board record covers and a name referencing an old English woman accused of witchcraft, it’s clear that Miles Whittaker and Sean Canty want to create the Wicker Man soundtrack that never was. Leaving behind most of the techno that could be found in last year’s Symbiosis (and on Modern Love as a whole), their planned 2010 run of three LPs is a lot more abstract and soaked in gallons of dread. Forest of Evil played with dub sounds and drones on the “Dusk” side but it was the “Dawn” side’s brutal, possessed tribal drum circle and unsettling aftermath that saw things get truly evil. The second volume in this story, Liberation Through Hearing reveals that was only the beginning.

Where Forest of Evil was a trip through Dante’s selva oscura, Liberation Through Hearing drops us not in limbo but in the darkest part of the wood. Immediately oppressive low end tones creak out of the monitors, and the narcotic plodding and hazy choral conjurings of “Caged in Stammheim” set a pretty dark stage (Stammheim here sounds not like the famous prison of Baader/Meinhof fame but like some medieval equivalent). “Eurydice” features more dense bass tones that are seemingly relentless but subside for a couple brief moments of levity. We all know how this story ends, however, as Orpheus looks back and the unbearable bass returns with sinister, twisted voices. Each track here has its own vivid narrative, from “Regolith”‘s static rumbling and distant foghorns to “Bardo Thodol”‘s composed incantations, but they all play a significant part in the overall narrative — the story of which is up to each listener.

It’s usually pretty hard to tell where Sean Canty’s sampled archives end and Miles Whittaker’s production begins, which is what makes the Demdike Stare project so appealing. Liberation Through Hearing resembles at once a collection of obscure sounds found on dusty old records but is at the same time highly composed and expertly paced. Liberation Through Hearing, both the record and the Tibetan Book Of The Dead, document not a single moment but a journey full of lucid hallucinations. And a thrilling journey at that, since Demdike Stare have produced some of the darkest, most immersive and exceptional music this year.

[Modern Love]

Both Rod Modell and Stephen Hitchell have kept themselves very busy since the release of the last Deepchord presents Echospace album on Modern Love, 2007′s The Coldest Season, and the evidence of their individual journeys is writ large all over the grooves of Liumin, the duo’s latest collaborative effort. If The Coldest Season was the soundtrack to a deep-dive into the sub-oceanic space beneath the largest glacier imaginable, Liumin warms things up considerably with much more active and aggressive grooves built on top of field recordings made on the streets of Tokyo (the field recordings themselves are available on a bonus disc, Liumin Reduced, included with the first pressing of the CD). The results are definitely still informed by dub — Modell and Hitchell aren’t making a complete 180 here — but are distinctly updated, conjuring aural images of rolling through the world’s most high-tech city at night, still full of old-world wonder but hypermodern all at once.

Opener “In Echospace” sets the tone with nary a beat in earshot, as deep, rolling waves of sound splash by in slow motion, peppered with sharp bites of static and disembodied voices cutting through the ether, ghosts of old radio broadcasts pulsing their way to the surface. The track melts away into the bullet train-intro of “Summer Haze” and the beats make their appearance at last. Percolating and lively but just shy of aggressive, this is the classic Echospace sound perfected, with swirling, looped chords and layers of echoing percussion fading in and out of the mix in a hypnotic blend that Modell and Hitchell must be thinking about copyrighting by now. Aside from the organic feel of the field recordings, that percussive base is the other way in which Liumin sets itself apart from its predecessor: where The Coldest Season was content to move in giant, monolithic swathes of rhythm, Liumin is active, even danceable.

“Sub-Marine” thumps along at a pretty good clip with some insistent rattles and funky low-end notes thrown in to move some asses, while “Maglev”‘s bass bubbles and snapping hi-hats are deep house played through a busted-ass speaker cone to surprisingly great effect. “BCN Dub” on the other hand, shambles along like an outtake from Hitchell’s stellar Intrusion project, wearing it’s Jamaican influence proudly as a spectral horn melody drifts through on a distant transistor box that just gets dirtier and dirtier as it repeats. Lesser artists may have reduced dub techno to its base elements and produced cookie-cutter tracks that ape the style set forth by Echospace and their sonic predecessors, but with Liumin, Modell and Hitchell prove that they are no one-trick ponies, evolving musically just as surely as they have maintained their distinctive sound. If you think you’ve heard everything that the dub techno genre could possibly throw at you, Liumin will prove you ain’t heard nothing yet.

[Modern Love]

It feels like Modern Love’s family is in the middle of a rave love affair. For starters, there’s the mysterious author of the Hate series de- and reconstructing high-speed darkcore; Andy Stott has got in on the act with the Daphne releases, nudging the rave aesthetic towards the house and dubstep compass points and now Claro Intelecto aka Mark Stewart follows suit with New Life. Making no bones about his record’s intentions is one thing, but refusing to sugar-coat his interpretation of the past or to view it from behind rose-tinted glasses are entirely different matters.

This Stewart achieves on “Back In the Day”; beginning with what a slightly out of tune riff that sounds like the halfway house between a long-forgotten hardcore record or the stab in Dave Clarke’s “Red 2″ — if I was going to be controversial I would say the halfway house is imaginary and these elements are interchangeable — the riff hangs in the air until one of Stewart’s trademark dubby beat patterns kicks in and a spray of liquid metal percussion propels it toward the dance floor. That Stewart does not seek to use this artifact to enliven the arrangement but instead drags it into a more morose place than he usually inhabits speaks volumes for both the track and his integrity. After all, we can only stand a finite amount of producers reminding us how great it was back in the day — it was and it wasn’t — and Stewart deserves praise for not adding his voice to that chorus of approval. Flipside “New Life” shows that Claro isn’t a miserable old soul. Based on another sample, this time what seems like a shimmering chord sequence from an old record by UK deep house collective DiY, the melodic twists and turns undulate like dust in the breeze but don’t stray too far thanks to a backing that sounds like Stewart’s take on U.S. tribal house. Out of his comfort zone but totally unfazed by his surroundings New Life marks a new beginning for Claro Intelecto.

[Modern Love]

The last time we heard from Andy Stott under his given name was via the chord heavy, single-sided, club murderer “Night Jewel.” More recently his solo, bass-wise excursion as Andrea (of Millie & Andrea duo) saw the producer pay homage to old jungle and breakbeat to equally devastating effect. The Mancunian’s latest release gets fathoms deep in the feeling with two horizontal pieces of house for slate gray days and heavy-hearted catharsis. Both sides are ponderous, oblique, deep house versions, filled with so much weighty emotion they threaten to break like looming, darkening clouds. It’s the kind of house music that could only come from the Northern, rain soaked skies and is a natural off-sider to the equally moody techno that the Modern Love label is so good at.

Stott seems to have procured inspiration for “Tell Me Anything” in the lower registers of his keyboards, pitching down the gravity-heavy pads to impossibly slow rates, and matching them with a bass line that is almost subliminal. It’s the shuffling hi-hats and stop motion claps that keep things rooted in a housey vein, along with some lighter, shimmering keys that momentarily appear to hover, weightless over the otherwise dense cloud of the track. “Love Nothing,” for all its nihilistic implications, tugs incessantly at the heart; its brooding, stone-wall chords are somehow buoyed by an icy vocal sample repeating, “drive me crazy.” When the rough-hewn decay of the chords threaten to become too much on their own, Stott unleashes another bass line that hits you way below the belt. These studied, purposeful maneuvers by Stott are typical of the quality we’ve come to expect from the Modern Love label, and add another must-have release to the discography of one of its chief propagators.

[Modern Love]

2009 must have flown by in a blur for Miles Whittaker. When he wasn’t invoking the spirits of local witches and making painstakingly pieced together but chilling soundtracks with Sean Canty as Demdike Stare — Symbiosis was a slow burning album highlight of the past 12 months — he was attempting to and largely succeeding in reuniting techno with the analogue grit it so patently lacks together with Gary Howell under his other witchcraft-inspired project, Pendle Coven (the evocative, sometimes menacing swagger of the duo’s Self-Assessment album should also feature prominently in any discerning “best of” list next month). In between all this group activity, Miles found the time to fly solo as MLZ to deliver a storming, spiraling acid take on Peter Van Hoesen’s “Attribute One,” and now “One Cycle.”

Whittaker’s fondness for obscure records and even more off the beaten track sample sources is audible on the title track; in fact, it fuels its main element — a spacey riff that swirls and filters its way throughout the course of the arrangement — but does so in such a droning, repetitive way it could be the creative spirit of Spacemen 3 inhabiting Whittaker’s machines. Having aligned it to a straight beat and subtle slivers of metallic percussion, Miles doesn’t add anything else to the arrangement because, well, he doesn’t really need to — like all the best electronic dance music, if the basic elements sound good and work well together, there is no need to complicate matters. Miles steps out of his comfort zone on the flip with a remix of the mysterious DJ Ghosthunter’s “Experiment 3.” The fact that he’s called it the “Theo Made Me Do It” version provides pointers as to his inspiration, and indeed there are jazzy licks bobbing about, guided by a low-slung jacking groove. Thankfully though, Whittaker doesn’t make the mistake of replicating the Detroit producer’s music, and the raw and noisy bass as well as the broken beats and backdrop of unidentifiable, abstract sound samples, mean once again Miles Whittaker has left his distinctive mark.

Modern Love have made a huge impact in 2009; the past few months alone have seen crucial releases by Claro Intelecto, MLZ and Demdike Stare. Now it’s label staple Andy Stott’s turn as he returns with only his second release this year, and it’s one that’s been well worth waiting for. Where Stott’s “Brief Encounter/Drippin” twelve dropped earlier in the year pandered to his late night deep techno and dubstep sides, the single sided “Night Jewel” finds Stott in a much more lively state of mind, ready for some serious sneaker squeaking.

Stott’s productions are founded on keeping things raw and relatively simple. You’ll not find unnecessary clutter filling out any of his tracks or plastic sounding digital effects tweaking them into oblivion; what you get is an analogue feel of uncooked moodiness crafted with absolute precision. “Night Jewel” is no exception to this method, using only a repetitive, building chord pattern and a sickeningly overweight bass to provide the melody for the track, with equally unfussy percussion to compliment it. The chords are filtered down to shards sharp as sharks teeth before rounding out again, creating a cyclic movement throughout the track, a sense of it almost breathing. The bass, when it finally drops, creates a vacuum that almost sucks the very life out of the other elements surrounding it. Simplistic to the end, “Night Jewel” adds and subtracts its components over the course of its duration, fires off subtly changing percussive hits and scores a direct bulls-eye with a track just wants to be re-cued the second it’s over.