- Shawn O'Sullivan's music comes in many guises, but the common threads are easy to tease out. With one or two exceptions—a house-leaning EP on WT Records, for instance—the New Yorker's records tend to go between drone-layered techno and a spacious, immersive sound akin to Further Reductions, the duo of O'Sullivan and Katie Rose. Just-In-Time, O'Sullivan's second 400PPM record, underscores how slippery his various masks can be—it's a very different animal from its Avian predecessor, Non Nocere.
Where that was basically a Shawn O'Sullivan megamix—with rich Further Reductions tones and high-strung noise set to galloping techno frames—Just-In-Time narrows its focus, yielding flintier music in the process. The excellent "Lender Of Last Resort" is fast and crunchy techno with a shamanic howl, a claustrophobic feeling at odds with O'Sullivan's preference for panoramic dimensions. He also puts the squeeze on "Everyday Extinction," whose haunted vocal swirls around tribal drum loops, bomb-shelter sirens and a steady hum, spinning it all into a whirlwind.
If O'Sullivan does one thing really well, it's give his music a generous sense of scale. He plays to this strength on "Resource Extraction," whose claps are sounded by the smack of metal on metal in some abandoned warehouse. (No doubt, the EP's title is a reference to the factory production method introduced by the Japanese auto industry.) "Chorleywood Bread," too, teems with the hum and buzz of labouring machines. It's a brisk 128 BPM, but doesn't feel quite so frenzied as its neighbours.
TracklistA1 Lender Of Last Resort
A2 Resource Extraction
B1 Everyday Extinction
B2 Chorleywood Bread