Tá mé i ngrá, i gconaí
This is a draft, I will finish it tomorrow. It’s all over the place, don’t read it. Too many adjectives.
Shackleton - Music For The Quiet Hour
I had this album recommended to me really enthusiastically by a friend a few weeks ago. I hadn’t listened to Shackleton since the Skull Disco EP a few years ago, and I’d given half listens to his (fairly excellent) collaboration with Pinch. That said I had some idea of what he was about. I was in for a surpirse, the Shackleton sound was still there but kaleidoscopified, dissected, tortured. The opening moments of Part One were more akin to musique concrete and EMS music than dubstep. Visceral and alien cracklings replaced the bass and East leaning percussion. Something resembling a steampunk killer whale seemed to have subsituted a traditional low end, with a magnified sine morse, coding out ancient messages amidst the pop and crackle, with flourishes of lower case paper shufflings occupying the vacant space in between. White noise hi hats, analogue pops and distant djembe serve as the most mimimal percussion before the album moves into it’s second phase of schizophrenic kalimba and manipulated shamanic vocal samples. The album continues in this vein with teasings of sci fi narrative, illustrating a technocratic universe in which only this kind of music could be the soundtrack.
Part Four consists mostly of a sample stating “It is, is, is, and it is now” which steadily becomes more granular and exponential with each series of bars. This becomes like an image in vacant space, slowly growing further away, transcending time and existing in multiple dimensions whilst artefactual percussion references the past as the whole composition drifts into white noise. The choice and placement of sounds is so meticulous throughout that everything remains a part of the same story, though evolving and changing it’s mood and intention. The concept of alternate dimension and time travel is summed up by a letter from collaborator Vengeance Tenfold to his Granddaughter in 2065 which is read out in part four.
Anybody who I mentioned the album to simply clutched their hair and said “What the fuck” out of sheer amazement. Shackleton has created an incredibly abstract album whilst not completely abandoning his UK basement roots. It’s like Burial viewed through a delirium tremen, occupying a hypnogogic space that is neither pleasant nor a nightmare, it simply begs to be dissected and understood.
Late night flippant drunk poetry is the way forward.
Cans laid on concrete
and on my pallete,
a sour taste on my person
the sliver moon stood silver in the air
like a discarded toenail
the air grew stale and stagnant
my keys jangled absent as an impromptu snare
the sun fucked off
the heat refused
my head grew sore
my feet grew tired
my heart grew fond
the canal grew stagnant
the rats are in their cage scratching and softly
eating the guinea pig food you left them.
Tumblr won’t let me create stanzas. Ohwell.
Sweet posters done by Daire using two shots I took of Birdseye and Grayskull.
dairecarolan:
_by Myself & Rob Mirolo
(Source: dairecarolan)
