This 11-track E.P. from Manni Dee is at times hardly what you might expect from the heavy hitting, noise loving UK producer, but creative distortion and cathedral-destroying kicks keep it planted firmly in industrial rave territory.
Opening with vocals that echo and gnash with all the hardly intelligible gothic solemnity of Dave Gahan (it’s actually Sylph from S.C.U.M.) paired with a haunted industrial synth arrangement and stomping kick, this E.P. from Manni Dee is at first glance hardly what you might expect from the heavy hitting, noise loving UK producer.
The moodiness accumulates a more intense valance in ’Take Time,’ a gritty industrial outing built out of time-dilated and unsettlingly detuned jittery stabs littered with a breakbeat that almost sounds in context like the low chug of a bass guitar on a metal track. Along with the doleful interlude that follows made of plucky bell sounds, drenched in so much reverb that the whole song swims in the liquid tones, this portion of the record sounds like it might have been recorded in a decaying forest-bound cathedral lost to time.
This illusion, and perhaps the very limestone walls of this imagined holy place are soundly obliterated by the determinedly swung wrecking-ball of the kicks on the next few tracks. This is the moment that the release sounds just right for the Perc Trax label, which has gained a lot of notoriety by regularly redefining the maximum level of the humble kick and snare’s brutal potential. Distortion layers on top of these monumental drum patterns like laser light lights defracted by cigarette smoke scanning the walls of a dingy rave basement. These swaths of deconstructive processing and imposed harmonics are so rich it becomes a kind of thermodynamically irreversible process, requiring the consultation of a techno soothsayer to determine what they might have been to begin with. There is a question of geometry here, of how sounds ricochet and self-interfere in different volumes. These layers fight tooth and nail for any scrap of headroom that can be stolen from these greedy, spectrum-hogging kicks, but the power of the end result is well worth it.
Take ‘Pivotal Summer’ for example. A hugely anthemic melody line slowly gains power through the phalanx of percussion like a tsunami on the horizon building imperceptibly into something lethal on a massive scale. The synthesizer alone rises to volumetrically inescapable proportion, subsuming all other elements by the end of the track in a rare twist of fate for the almighty kick drum. It’s a perfectly timed release for the clubs, at long last, reopening worldwide. On ‘London in my System,’ percussion flies as though flung from the tornado-marked path of a cartoon Tasmanian devil; Chris Liberator declaring his undying love for London as a fury of fast-attack acid builds up and dissipates into a slowly disintegrating piano outro and sneak-attack disorientingly syncopated closer.
-Winston Mann
Link – Bandcamp
