Available on: Mordant Music 12″

Vindicatrix is a funny bugger, hard to pin down, the kind of artist you want to get behind. The 2009 12″+ CDR package Die Alten Boser Lieder is his most complete release to date, traversing horror electronics, droning industrial, ethno-dubstep and skew-whiff minimal techno with unnerving confidence and flair, but thanks to ‘Hume’/’Unborn Vectors’ it is no longer his best.

The Mordant Music catalogue has always been notable for mixing a touch of rhythmic grit in with the more slippery, uncanny sounds and signifiers of hauntology – lest we forget, this is the label that introduced us to Shackleton – and so it’s unsurprising that MM remains Vindicatrix’s chosen outlet for releasing music. They serve up ‘Hume’/’Unborn Vectors’ on a proper hand-stamped, spray-painted disco maxi, the perfect vessel for a pair of tunes that employ dancefloor tropes in the service of an altogether more surreal and stricken vision.

A close cousin to Boser cuts ‘Lack of Correspondence’ and ‘Sirocco Swirl’, ‘Hume’ clocks in at an epic 13:38, and justifies every second of its existence. Its reverb-heavy drum snaps and vocal emoting put me in mind of Brooklyn/Berlin hype-magnet How To Dress Well, but whereas HTDW’s vocals pastiche commercial R&B harmonics, Vindicatrix’s channel the inscrutably anguished croon of Scott Walker. ‘Hume’ is a cover of Michael Jackson’s ’83 single ‘Human Nature’, but the interpretation is so oblique and transforming that it entirely avoids glibness; young Jacko is recast as a pale-faced (not that hard to picture, admittedly) goth trudging through the streets of a gloomy Northern suburb with nowt but a broken heart and a book of middling poetry for company.

As the track goes on – and on, and on – the sense of loss it evokes and elicits threatens to become overwhelming, but before the tear-ducts can get flare into life a game-changing second movement (for want of a better word) kicks in – muffled crowd noise garlanding a lean, tunnelistic techno rhythm a la Perlon or early Herbert, replete with salt-cured claps and a burbling, cycling, almost-acid synth line. When the crowd noise is suddenly shed, the drop into naked 4/4 has genuine hands-in-the-air force, but the deathly pall cast by the first movement lingers, and keeps those hands firmly in pockets.

On B-side ‘Unborn Vectors’ our man goes so far into Scottness that he verges on self-parody, but the arrangement and unfolding of the track is beautiful enough for it not to matter – those crushed-velvet vowels set adrift in an amniotic wash of GAS-esque ambience before a rugged beat pattern and swooning strings steer us into elegiac techno territory not a million miles away from early Lawrence or Pantha Du Prince.

‘Hume’/’Unborn Vectors’ is a 12″ of complex, conflicted and dazzlingly well-executed music, so much more ballsy and distinctive than most anything in the pop culture-pilfering hypna/haunto camp right now. It remains to be seen whether Vindicatrix can, in the future,  suppress the ghost of Mr Engel and make that croon his own, but right now it scarcely matters, his application of it is so grandly original. What a wonderful record this is.

Kiran Sande