Even for an artist so adept at reinvention, Service’s run of EPs main as much as Rhythm Immortal was astounding. He developed an authentic techno language with an historical junglist script. A mixtape referred to as Pre-Milennium Witchcraft was the Rosetta Stone, a showcase of mid-late-’90s drum’n’bass that also sounds dumbfounding as we speak. It’s exact and sophisticated, with that in-the-room feeling that Service conures up, the sound of objects in three-dimensional area moderately than an Ableton grid. The place EPs like In Spectra showcased that percussive wizardry, Rhythm Immortal slows issues right down to a faucet drip of drums and arcane noises, a chef plating with tweezers.
There’s one different precedent for Rhythm Immortal: the ultimate Shifted report, Fixed Blue Mild, which targeted on the microscopic motion of percussion and synths as a part of a monolithic wall of sound rather than techno’s traditional ahead movement. Service’s album has the identical really feel—the primary drums on opener “A Level Most Essential” land with a whipcrack, jostling up soil round them, after which work out a herky-jerky sample that doesn’t really feel rooted in any acquainted dance music style. Percussive sounds transfer backwards after which forwards, with delay envelopes which might be reversed or all of a sudden gated, dissolving immediately. It appears like a higher-tech model of Photek’s notorious drum martial arts, taking part in with the very material of the spacetime continuum, not simply the rhythms of drum’n’bass—as if Brewer had been taking part in god with the legal guidelines of physics, freezing occasions in actual time and reversing them earlier than letting them unspool ahead as soon as once more.
This impact is strongest on “Outer Shell.” Right here, Brewer turns elemental forces unfamiliar, with drums that appear to wade via a mucky pond earlier than all of a sudden aquaplaning excessive. The impact is startling, particularly given the periodic silences between sharp snare drums that would have been ripped from a Rudy Van Gelder session. “Wave After Wave” and “Lowland Tropic” each retool the thrust of drum’n’bass into an anxious pitter-patter undergirded by fairly synth melodies which might be shaped into icily good geometric shapes. That is music that makes you are feeling it greater than hear it, channeling the ghosts of Brewer’s glory days into an eerie dance-music shadow realm.
This ouija board act peaks with “That Veil of Yours,” an ASMR-tingly collaboration with Voice Actor. Noa Kurzweil’s distinct, sibilant voice exhales over a synthetic soundscape of howling wind and martial drums. All of it sounds uncanny, shifting in unnatural arcs with textures which might be sanded down and trebly. However each sound in “That Veil of Yours” is concrete and current, taking on area in a approach we don’t often affiliate with digital music. Rhythm Immortal asks: What if techno had been produced from blood, sweat, and stone, as an alternative of inside a laptop computer? As “That Veil of Yours” bleeds into the earth-shaking rumble of “Carbon Works,” that hypothetical begins to really feel somewhat scary, but additionally exhilarating. And, most shockingly of all, genuinely new.
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