Chris Wenn

Thugstep, tuffstep, ruffstep. That’s the kind of sound that superstar remixer and DJ Diplo is presenting on this gurning, grunting compilation. It’s unsubtle, revelling in rigid drum patterning and video-game squeaks which speak more of methamphetamine-fuelled nu-skool breaks than the woozy spaces of dubstep’s formative releases. Even genre hero Skream‘s remix of Major Lazer (‘Hold the Line’) loses any sense of atmosphere, reducing itself to shouty, digital-dancehall posturing. Although Blow Your Head seems to be positioned as a kind of survey of trans-Atlantic bass, it completely elides the genre’s roots in 2step, dub and drum’n'bass in favour of a continuum of thuggish ‘screwface’ tracks – thick, brick-like slabs of bass in your face, more akin to Miami’s jeep music of the late 80s and 90s. That connection is made explicit on the Diplo/Lil Jon effort ‘U Don’t Like Me’, a naked attempt to renew the ‘chestplate bizness’ of grimey tracks like Plastician‘s ‘Intensive Snare‘ without the production values – trading off spacious menace for cartoonish threats.

The tracks collected here don’t skitter or bounce, there’s no sense of weight to them – it’s rather like the material trickling out from former Hardcore and Gabber artists but with an eye to pop acceptability (Jessica Mauboy? Really?) that seems to be seeking a defiantly masculine dancefloor. Unlike the 2006 survey of similar tough-edged sounds, Werk‘s gloriously wonky (but sonically uneven) Grim FM, Blow Your Head reduces female presence to appropriated vocal lines, while the sweaty testosterone basslines and snarling MCs seem to encourage a mosh-pit atmosphere.

Especially compared to the broad-ranging 5: Five Years of Hyperdub, which covers several artists from the same global milieu, Blow Your Head seems narrow and weak, despite its ferocious chest-beating.

Suicide in Dark Serenity

My experience with Black Metal is recent – discovering Wolves in the Throne Room late in 2009 was the catalyst for exploring much deeper into this often secretive and misunderstood world than just a couple of sunn o))) albums. Although the fiercely controversial Scandinavian roots of the genre (Darkthrone, Mayhem, and so forth) hold a certain fascination, it is really the outsiders of this already fiercely independent sound that appeal to me. Californian artist Malefic (Scott Conner) released work as Xasthur from 1997 until 2010, with 8 full-length albums and some 15 demos, EPs and split releases. Suicide in Dark Serenity is a ferocious evocation of the Xasthur milieu – a raw and gritty production that eschews low end for tearing mids and highs, a feature that certainly tests the limits of digital playback. Like his avowed inspiration, Burzum, Malefic fills Suicide in Dark Serenity with eerie synth washes and knife-edged guitar, but seems much bolder in composition. Opener ‘Intro’ blends furious tremolo with a dissonant, almost grating synth – part drone, part ugly atmosphere – and there is some truly intriguing use of choral voice elsewhere on this compact EP. Where Burzum is repetitive and blandly derivative, Xasthur (for all the project’s misanthropic, paranoid vibe) is adventurous, making excellent use of the studio-based one-man-band restrictions of atmospheric black metal to create texture within the five tracks here.

Thematically, Suicide in Dark Serenity rests on vengeance, hatred, and the kind of Stirnerite individualism and radical primitivism that characterises US Black Metal. It is fascinating that US bands such as Wolves in the Throne Room, Xasthur and Nachtmystium tend to emphasise that very American libertarian philosophy – self-reliance, individualism, the right to violent defence of belief and body – over the Scandanavian scene’s distinctive pagan/Satanist mysticism. On Suicide in Dark Serenity we find a kind of pure form of nihilist sentiment – the heretic hurling final, impotent curses at the deadly universe, raising a sword in a hopeless act of defiance. The blistered vocals and screeching guitars are in themselves the serenity of death – not noble death, or worthy, but death calmly accepted as inescapable. There is pain, there is blood, and there is fear, but there will be nothing afterwards. Silence.

Phillip Sollman’s 2007 debut as Efdemin owes as much to Kompakt‘s austere dancefloor minimalism as it does to deep, funky tech-house. The pulsing, metronomic kickdrum anchors a jittery percussion, richly textured with spacious reverbs and dubby delay – a hedonistic Basic Channel fuelled on 2AM nightclub benders, revelling in abandon. In the rarified atmosphere that has come with minimal techno and house’s music-press acceptance, we tend to forget that we’re examining a dancefloor culture, one that leads directly from the sweating, orgiastic nightclubs of Chicago to the laser-cut precision of Frankfurt, Cologne and Berlin. With glistening atmospheres layered over slinky, sensuous basslines, this eponymous release by Efdemin on cult label Dial may not have the cerebral undertones we claim to expect from the German techno scene, but delivers the raw groove that characterised second-wave Detroit artists such as Kenny Larkin and Carl Craig.

Sollman is not attempting dancefloor heroics here – these tracks are slow-burning grooves rather than bombastic floor-fillers, filled with emotive and sensual flourish. This is techno sex music, the press of bodies against one another in the dark. Even the few intelligible vocal samples in these tracks seem somehow seductive, for all the 60s B-movie authority the original material must have had. Even the 11-minute house bump of ‘April Fools’ seems to invest the maleness of the echoing vocal with a kind of hood-eyed promise and a smouldering late-night passion.

Efdemin is no work of techno genius, but it fits comfortably amongst the full-length output of the luminaries of the scene. It’s wise to remember that the history of house and techno is dominated by one-off anthems, a flurry of releases by one artist under many names, and classic splits, collaborations and remixes. Delivering a consistent, consistently funky sound is something to be valued.

Brian Lustmord is a phenomenon in dark sound. The towering, ferocious energy of albums such as Heresy and The Dark Places of The Earth is in complete contrast to other bass warriors such as Nordvagr or Scorn – Lustmord’s intensity is tightly focussed, utterly lacking in the woozy ketamine haze typical of this end of the industrial spectrum. This makes Other Dub an even more unsettling effort. Cribbing that ganja-hazed Jamaican style against the already cavernous sound that typifies a Lustmord album would seem, at first glance, to make a mockery of the incisive, steely focus found in his other work. However, this is dub, but not as we know it. This 40-minute EP, released in 2009, is driven by a simple, metronomic dub percussion line, drums stripped of the pulse of Jamaican reggae, ‘othered’ into pulsing menace. Orbiting around this steady thump are the trademark Lustmord drones, howls and trumpet-blasts. They rise and fall against the pulse, sometimes swamping it, sometimes drifting so far into the background that the beat is left tramping like heavy footsteps in a dark alley, behind! in front! all around you!

The whole is fleshed out by clanging guitar strikes, knife-edged and grating, and cracking snare hits which echo into the terrifying distance. This ‘othered’ dub speaks only of menace and an overwhelming power – a soundtrack to Satanic rituals in a remote sugar plantation; and unknown, half-hidden fears.