Available on: Eat Concrete 12″

Aardvarck: ‘Wall E Synth’

Not content with pursuing brittle, dubstep-influenced grindhouse through his Bloom white label series, Amsterdam’s Aardvarck has started a new project – this time titled Gloom – that if the first 12″ is anything to go by, appears to be dedicated to just as filthy excursions in club-unfriendly dance music.

That’s not filthy in the comedy dubstep sense of the word either – Aardvarck’s contributions to this 12″ sound like they’re treading slurry. They’re ugly and horrible, in the most potent kind of sense; the same way that the gloop incarnations of Zomby’s Hyperdub EP were. Even on ‘Tekk Toek’, the only Aardvarck track here with any glisten, you never feel like you’re far from an abattoir.

Kubus’s half of this release is less interesting from where I’m sitting, approaching similar themes to Aardvarck’s but with less natural panache and imagination. It’s when closer ‘Schweinenblut’ bears its teeth that things start to seem evenly matched.

Tam Gunn