- Shackleton meets his match in Japanese artist Scotch Rolex for what becomes one of the UK producer's most approachable records in years.
- Any entry point into Shackleton's catalog feels like the deep end. His work since 2012's Music For The Quiet Hour/The Drawbar Organ EPs has been heady, heavy and forbidding, often collected on marathon-length albums that feel like the electronic equivalent of '70s narcotic-jam head-blowers like Hawkwind's Space Ritual. Shigeru Ishikawa is a different, more accessible kind of weirdo—the kind of guy who might stop to flip an actual pancake in the middle of his Boiler Room set in between screaming into a mic and coaxing unholy sounds out of a Game Boy. But both are artists turned on by extremes, and on their collaborative album Death By Tickling, Shackleton's stone-faced approach and Ishikawa's playfulness work beautifully together, without canceling each other out.
This is Ishikawa's second release as Scotch Rolex following 2021's Tewari, a collaboration with artists on the forward-thinking Ugandan club label Hakuna Kulala. That album was in line with Ishikawa's usual abrasive M.O., but Death By Tickling is more on Shackleton's wavelength. There are lots of hand drums, huge swells of bass tend to erupt without warning, and any empty space is filled with Shackleton's usual percussive residue, the sound of a very large knife ceaselessly being sharpened.
But if Death By Tickling is languid by Ishikawa’s standards, it’s tight by Shackleton’s, with shorter tracks than the ten-minute-plus behemoths that tend to populate his latter albums. The two let a little bit of ambience go a long way, allowing their dubscapes to drift just long enough for the listener’s attention to drift before introducing something remarkable: an incredible double-time rhythm in the second half of "Shattered," a wall of kuduro-like polyrhythms on "Deliver The Soul," a laborious hi-hat that turns "The Blue Sun" from a garden-variety ambient intro to something resembling a house track just as it starts to peter out. Death By Tickling is a strikingly unpredictable listen, where everything moves at such a natural pace that there’s no sense of whiplash or disorientation.
There's an alternate-universe version of this record where Ishikawa played a stronger role in dictating the album's direction and skewed Shackleton's sound towards his own sonic overload. Shackleton's collaborations often allow him to indulge his wildest ideas, but Death By Tickling often sounds like a Shackleton album with a good editor—which also describes Departing Like Rivers, an LP that burrowed towards the core of his sound rather than pushing at its edges or indulging its proggiest tendencies. These two records are an easy starting place for his catalog, and a crucial part of Shackleton's appeal is that his catalog has never been "easy." This is not the deep end, in other words, though most artists could only dream of making an album that organizes chaos as deftly as this one.
Tracklist01. The Blue Sun
02. Asterids (Enter Life)
03. Five Butterflies
04. Deliver the Soul
05. Final Spasm
06. Love Songs
07. Opium Vibration
08. Shattered
09. Serotonin
10. The Eleventh Voyage