"SickElixir is not an album much interested in gently easing the listener into its darkly claustrophobic world. The first thing you hear is roughly approximate to the distressing sound of someone alternately gasping for breath and attempting to clear their passages of phlegm. It's joined by a distorted bass drum overlaid with a metal-on-metal clank in lieu of a snare."
"This will hardly come as a shock to anyone with prior knowledge of his oeuvre. From the moment he started releasing music as Blawan beginning in 2010 with Fram, a twitchy, unsettling take on UK bass released by revered label Hessle Audio Roberts has cut an impressively unbiddable figure. His style was marked by an industrial darkness that even seeped into his rework of Brandy's lush R&B track I Wanna Be Down"
The album opens with gasping, phlegm-like breaths, a distorted bass drum, a metal-on-metal clank as a snare substitute, radio-interference noises, warped guttural chanting, and screeching electronic tones within the first minute. The sound prioritizes industrial darkness, abrasive textures, and claustrophobic atmosphere over melodic ease or mainstream appeal. Earlier releases established twitchy UK bass idioms and a willingness to warp R&B and mainstream samples into unsettling frameworks, producing occasional crossover in DJs’ sets. After a multi-year hiatus from releasing under that name, a subsequent debut LP resisted conventional album gestures and doubled down on an uncompromising, unbiddable sonic identity.
Read at www.theguardian.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]