Blawan: SickElixir

"Spirals of blaring noise echo as though chained to the bottom of some long-forgotten cistern. A voice, far removed from normal diction, barks syllables in a harsh, lurching cadence. What remains of regular meter exists only as a log of controlled chaos-fetid, cavernous rhythms that batter a crumbling foundation. It all sounds ready to break apart. British producer Blawan holds it together on "The GL Lights," the opening track of SickElixir."

"When charting his development, the artist born Jamie Roberts recalls feverish after-school drum practice and a fascination with the metallic shrieks of an industrial mincer that soundtracked work as a maggot farmer in South Yorkshire. In his earliest releases, tidy post-dubstep singles for labels like the legendary Hessle Audio, this fascination manifested as mechanistic perfection: skeletal grooves dominated by surgically arranged percussion."

Spirals of blaring noise, cavernous rhythms, and harsh, lurching vocal syllables open SickElixir, anchored by mechanized, industrial textures. Blawan extracts techno from dense strata of grit, navigating sharp edges and contortions into startling, corroded dance music steeped in glossolalia. Early work featured tidy post-dubstep grooves and surgically arranged percussion that reflected a fascination with metallic, industrial sounds. Subsequent releases introduced noisier, grittier, and more organic beats while preserving slick arrangements. By 2018's Wet Will Always Dry, a poetics of distortion began to emerge. Seven years later, SickElixir assembles those elements into a brutish, unhinged record of clamorous, wounded synths.

Read at Pitchfork