Tuesday 9 November 2010

Voltage Black

Here's something kind of different to the run of darkness I seem to have been mining recently, although I managed to retain the thread in this artist's name - Voltage Black; London based solo producer Ewan Fisher (I'm starting to get confused over what people like this are called, it's the electronics that confound things - is it producer or one man band?) who, I think, is going to grab you and shake you in a very satisfying fashion. As much Errors as 65 Days of Static the paths to his current incarnation are clearly drawn and run clear into the twin influences that direct Voltage Black; Ewan once played in a now-defunct post rock band and also creates abstract blip glitch as 8BitBitchSlap. Here any flighty post rock is kept in check by fractal meshes of ring modulation that lock the riffs down to their most essential elements, which in turn are pinned down by some solid and forceful beats, and no small amount of well composed songwriting, creating a kinetic dynamism full of pregnant pauses, weighted chasms of ambience that drop out onto planing drone that kick into the distorted fused forward thrust of synth and guitar leads. 

New single The Flowers are Explosive is both pretty and combustible as it suggests in its title. Wordlessly building across increasingly volcanic peaks until it jumps out of itself in a boiling finale and reminds me a lot of old Southampton friend of NFR The Middle Computer who created one truly incredible homespun album of similar stuff. The other is a remix of What Went Wrong by °Ç Ø Ŀ Đ ỊÑ ß Є Ř Ł İ И  (Excellent spelling - as Metal as it is WitchHouse) - a band who join up the gaps between the new (Crystal Castles / White Ring) - with the old (Siouxsie and the Banshees / The Creatures / Alien Sex Fiend) The remix destroys the original, shattering the body of it across a throbbing bastard of a beat. Don't know if the original material is that hot, it's got a bit of fire in it, but the remix here really brings the beast out of it in a more relentlessly aggressive fashion.

  The Flowers Are Explosive by Voltage Black

  What Went Wrong - Cold In Berlin (Voltage Black remix) by Voltage Black

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