Available on: Skudge 2×12″
The album as a viable entity in 2011 is a bit of a tricky concept really. Reliance on mp3 downloads, the playlist replacing the mixtape, and the emergence Spotify and its ilk, have led to an eroding of the need for a coherent theme being passed on through 74 minutes of related sound. Which is a shame really; there’s something altogether more pleasing about a musically consistent, deliberately sequenced group of tracks than a shuffle-led nihilistic stab at randomness.
Back in the heady vinyl-suffused days of the last century, the answer for artists who had loads of material but no conceptual or thematic hat to hang it on was the double pack. Techno artists would use it to show a more expansive side to their sound without necessarily having to shoehorn in some shit about astrology or whether Pluto is/was a planet.
Times have changed. As techno has slowly 3-point turned itself out of the stylistic cul-de-sac it had edged into, so too the double pack has lost any point in existing in an age when you can buy the 3 tracks you like from an artists entire back catalogue in seconds. And the resurgence in interest in techno – be it in the genre’s Detroit roots, by-now ubiquitous nods to the Berlin branch-off or other genres tapping into classic UK techno sounds – has led both to some amazing new music from (to pick at random) Sigha, Spatial, Sandwell District, Perc and Kowton as well as much deserved new recognition for the likes of James Ruskin, Luke Slater, Mark Flash and Rolando (the latter two’s remixes for LuckyMe and Local Action demonstrating techno’s relevance to UK bass music).
There’s a good case to be made, then, for the modern techno album as a relevant article. And this release by Skudge – a Swedish duo, much tipped, with six well-received 12″s and a remix series with a dream line-up – definitely ticks the box of what would once be a great double-pack. But it’s hard to see the point in presenting the 12 tracks here as an album.
It certainly ticks the boxes of techno albums from days gone by. Starting with a drumless intro track, two other ‘experimental’ (for which read – influenced, in a good way, by classic GPR/Rising High records from Black Dog, Luke Slater’s 7th Plain et al) tracks interspersed around the full-on club tracks, all of which bang in the right places, each boasting a variety of deft touches of drum programming. The aforementioned intro, ‘Ursa Major’, is by quite a long way the best thing here, melding detuned chord drift against Berlin grind, topped with a skeletal arpeggio, whilst title track ‘Phantom’, (previously on 12″ with the superior and absent ‘Below’) and ‘Downtown’ are the two other standouts, with ‘Downtown’ hinting at trackier Chicago influence whilst simultaneously riffing on Cristian Vogel.
The problem is that these tracks are by and large all working from a similar formula. Taking a similar template to the EQD and Wax releases, they build the beat up quickly, then play on a central riff with ocassional bass action. But whilst Rene Pawlowitz is able to keep the linearity for EQD and Wax and build a much more expansive, cohesive sound for his Shed albums, Skudge struggle to escape from this trap. It’s notable that a further highlight comes in the deferred gratification of ‘Vanisher’, where you are continually awaiting the arrival of the ubiquitous 4/4 bassdrum, only to become lost instead in the cavernous bass and swirling pulses; it ends without you quite realising that the kick never came.
These are great tracks, for sure, and there is a certain famous Berlin club where it can be imagined they will dazzle. But together they are somehow less than the sum of their parts. While literally – in it’s 2×12″ format – a doublepack, it would have been more interesting to hear Skudge really stretch their wings and bring us a proper album.
Ruaridh Law
