Graham Dunning’s “Silo” released on Fort Evil Fruit is a wonderful anatomy of the percussive: taking the essential thematic elements of different techno styles and stripping away absolutely everything that doesn’t need to be there.
This “Silo” EP truly is a wonderful anatomy of the percussive. Muted drums and frayed shakers shuffle like a balletic choreography in lockstep with croaking modular. Then a welcome flourish of Detroitian sound, decomposed through rhythmic trickery and a rebellion against the standard musical scale deploys to surprisingly rapturous effect on tracks like “Cyborg is Exploded into Space.” Industrial elements expand with the deconstructionist’s appreciation of empty space, of letting certain sounds linger in air, of appreciating the impact of the addition of a single new sound or pattern.
Rhythm seems to accumulate together in some sections, like the way rainwater accumulates into rivulets alongside streets, navigating complex patterns of blockages. Chilling scintillations that begin to collect into breakneck but still muted experiments on “Floating Object” function as a good example of this central motivation: take the core elements of different techno styles and strip away everything that doesn’t need to be there.
For whatever reason, this “Silo” release has made me wonder about the neurology of the kinds of people who like techno music. Of this tight community who worship at the altar of noise, people find comfort in the certainty of being ferried from one discreet moment to the next with the guarantee of sound galloping seamlessly from one triptych of chords to the next. The ability of this music to, in a sense, build a new digital time grid on top of the analog time of the quotidian. One that comprises a kick and snare instead of the entropic motion of particles. The greater partition of hours and the greater still epochs of work, and sleep, and the time we manage to wrestle away for ourselves in a cultural condition insisting perpetually on wrestling it away from us.
-Winston Mann
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