Wasteland: Amen Fire
The sequel to their critically-acclaimed "Amen Fire" LP, Wasteland is I-Sound and DJ Scud, the former Illbient New Yorker, the latter Hackney Yardcore layabout and the key word with "October", their near lachrymose autumnal collection of beatscapes, is restraint. I spotted only one gnarly Mentasm riff (lurking on the LP's opener "Sandwood"), and absolutely no rampaging Amen breaks. The deadly duo seem intent on exploring rusty practically locked-grooves, indeed the experience of listening is rather like watching a rickety loom weaving chain-mail underwear.
The sonics are often brittle, as coarse as Grime producers Youngstar and Skepta's utilitarian Playstation riddims (though it would be more accurate to describe this as a FWD record on 45), each track exploring it's own logic, harmonies falling in to place dictated by each's machinic gyrations. Cold in this sense, almost archetypically dystopian on "Shadow Line" and "Wintermission". Hooks come in the strangest forms, "Shadow Line's" clippety-clop coconut drums, the striating cyborg strings of "Flashpoint", the junkyard gamelan of "Industrial Injury," the trigger-finger morse of "Saturation."
If anything the sonics are a little too mercilessly dessicated, so in this sense the instrumental carnage is enlivened by the last two tracks of the record, which point to the suite's themic organisation, dry the damp and clear away the dry ice. "Emerge and See" starts off as the other tracks are wont, skulking in the nuclear bunker, before splintering into a Cocteau Twins shimmer of supremely pretty high-pitched reverberating harmony, the musical equivalent of a post-apocalyptic dawn. Finally "In Your Sleep" has yet more fun, riding in on the same elegiac tone as the last track then fielding a somnabulant Italian House rave piano (Glowsticks ahoy!) before segueing into a section wherein a cowboy plays wonky Koto. All charmingly improbable.