- Shackleton touches on dark ambient, modern classical and other new styles with his signature brilliance intact.
- Sam Shackleton isn't the sort of artist who needs a new alias to justify musical detours. Given the English producer's knack for apocalyptic atmospheres, his expanding sonic palette has felt deeply connected at every juncture. Even so, The Purge Of Tomorrow represents a notable change: he's fully committed to home listening here, ditching his usual snaking basslines and steering clear of the club. The Other Side of Devastation, his first EP under the name, is a beautiful EP that finds him at top form with longform beatless soundscapes.
Right from the jump, the 14-minute opener, "Time Moving," feels like a new tack. It positions itself as a sort of hypnosis session, with sampled vocals setting the mood both texturally and thematically. They talk about happiness and the slow passage of time, and the music lets us settle into a trance-like state: gamelan-like percussion reverberates alongside electronic ripples, creating intersecting rhythms that feel like soothing waters. It's one of the most lush compositions that Shackleton's ever made, and it steadily builds into an ambitious epic. Cinematic strings collide with triplet pulses, and then screeching tones hint at catharsis. Shackleton doesn't sully the world he's created with a cheap climax, though, and instead lets the track ebb and flow naturally.
The nine-minute "Waves" is just as enveloping. It's built on a foundation of drifting ambience that exude beachside romanticism. There's dappled percussion, too, whose layered rhythms and timbres conjure images of the ocean's rich biodiversity. The song gets louder, more psychedelic, and even a little futuristic in its introduction of warbled electronics. When processed vocals arrive, Shackleton ties the EP's two tracks together while underlining how all this serenity was a manufactured ruse. It's subtly sinister in this way, and ties The Other Side of Devastation back to the dark, mysterious, and science-fiction proclivities he's always had. As always, Shackleton's music is unmistakably his own, no matter what form it takes or what name it comes under.
Tracklist01. Time Moving
02. Waves