- Appleblim and Adam Wedge make dubby DIY dance music with brilliant sound design on Peak Oil.
- Laurie Osborne, AKA Appleblim, and Adam Winchester both attended Bath Spas Creative Music Technology course. Another producer, Lurka, recently told me about this course, in particular a great lesson where you have to compose a track with artefacts made from basic plugins. I don't know if Osborne or Winchester sat in on that exact module, but on Antiposition—the Berlin-based duo's third record together as Wrecked Lightship—it's blemishes like those that make their dark and brooding deconstructed club so enjoyable.
It sounds unhinged when "Sunken Skies" crams extra beats into its drum & bass rhythm, and feels wrong when the taiko-sized drums on "Bizarre Servant" hobble through its cavernous dub techno, like two tracks clanging together in a badly blended mix. In the hands of the wrong producers these would just sound like mistakes, but here these idiosyncrasies give everything a punk or free jazz feel. The duo's next-level sound design carries them beyond any old genre reference. The plops of sub bass in the sparse downtempo of "Diminished Ark" are moody, like they'll finish the bar if they have to. And the Predator-like clicks on "Hex" are the aural equivalent of mosquitoes on an idyllic stroll through the Amazon. Disturbing, yes, but part and parcel of the experience.
"If you can't make interesting music on cheap, broken, unpopular, available to all, or supposedly 'poor quality' instruments, then you're doing something wrong," Osborne said in a 2021 interview. Whether he and Winchester made music on cheap gear doesn't matter. It's their attitude that means that, even though both of them have had some formal education in music production, they revel in musical and production flaws on Antiposition, making "wrong" sound so right.
Tracklist01. Hex
02. Bizarre Servants
03. Antiposition
04. Sunken Skies
05. Diminished Ark
06. Sounding Bodies