- London has long since left an indelible mark on electronic music. The city itself is less permanent. Its tendency to destroy and rebuild, displace and relocate, and its current wave of gentrification form the backbone of A City Remembrancer, the debut album from Ed Gillett, AKA Shape Worship. He's previously released leftfield dance workouts for Gang Of Ducks and Exotic Pylon, but here his music is even more abstract. Gillett layers field recordings, speech samples and rhythms from the UK hardcore continuum into one inscrutable tapestry. It's among the year's densest, most arresting experimental records. Gillett taps into a deep well of feeling from London's rich past and beleaguered future, making Remembrancer equal parts love letter and eulogy.
Gillett's music is painstakingly crafted, yet impressionistic and fleeting. He structured the album like a series of hazy recollections, with the blurry focus of someone grasping at the furthest reaches of their memory. New bits of information appear seemingly at random, forming odd, half-translucent layers that give the album a dreamily distant quality. It's fascinating to hear the songs morph into each other, like how opener "Tamesis (Vision)" transforms from a comforting bob into "Zoned (Hecate)"'s ephemeral post-dubstep. The album plays like a kind of UK music history lesson, illustrating the relationships between different genres by mashing them together. We get delicate grime ("Vertices (Ziggurat)"), dub ("Rentiers Dub") and, most memorably, jungle, which gets muscled into a chaotic techno rhythm on "Decanted."
Decanting is the UK's euphemism for the eviction of tenants in order to make way for new development. Gentrification and the displacement that it causes is the core thread tying together A City Remembrancer, and the connection becomes most obvious on "Heygate Palimpsest." The album's centerpiece focuses on the South London housing estate Heygate, which underwent a botched regeneration, permanently forcing out its tenants against their will while the land was sold to a private developer. The track features sad and frustrated testimonials from residents, layered together until the chorus of chatter becomes hard to understand. It's an aural representation of the thicket of bureaucracy that surrounds any kind of government real estate decision, but the voices are reminders that these decisions affect real people. That's what makes Remembrancer so powerful: it's not just about London, one of the world's most sprawling and alienating metropolises, it's about home.
Even if A City Remembrancer focuses on a very particular time and place, informed by Gillett's experience, its sentiment becomes universal. The album figures electronic music not as the late-night refuge from the stress and sprawl of urban life, but as its very soundtrack. There's something especially approachable about Gillett's work here, a mundane wooziness it shares with, say, his fellow Brits in the Ghost Box collective. But where that crew seize on the mystery and nostalgia of the English countryside, Gillett captures the overwhelming sensory experience of city life, from the rapidly changing shapes and structures to the distant chatter that permeates every corner of this record. With Remembrancer, Gillett sought to portray the contradictions of living in London, and he's come up with a record as dazzling, dizzying and affecting as that should be.
Tracklist01. Tamesis (Vision)
02. Zoned (Hecate)
03. Mudlarks
04. Vertices (Ziggurat)
05. Heygate Palimpsest
06. An Exemplar
07. Paternoster (Look)
08. Rentiers Dub
09. 1987 (Interlude)
10. Saffron And Jasmine
11. Decanted (Mohir)
12. Necropolis (So Many)