- Unlike electronic music designed for dancing, where micro-scenes become a kind of cultural ideology for the groups that gather in their temples by night, electronica is less inclined to pursue agendas. With the exception of the Artificial Intelligence series on Warp in the early nineties which brought together Aphex, Autechre and Plaid to define the template for "electronic listening music," its trajectory has been dictated by a series of idiosyncratic producers or labels—a Boards Of Canada here, a Jan Jelinek there.
Perhaps it's this lack of agenda that has turned 25-year-old London producer Jack Marchment back to electronic music's earliest incarnations on his third album, his first for Herb following releases on Scottish electronica stalwart Benbucula. As the tongue-in-cheek title suggests, references to the early dabblings of composers like Xenakis and Edgard Varèse abound. BBC Radiophonic Workshop legend Delia Derbyshire is among those that Marchment explicitly references in his sampling of '40s, '50s and '60s oddities, repainting them in figurative shapes to suit ears raised on the glitch and crunch of more contemporary structures.
The woozy analogue textures that result frequently recall Boards Of Canada, especially in the gorgeous opener, "Schult-Abbey," which builds a patina of textures of barely perceptible difference to express a simple melody. Likewise, "Albers" squeezes dusty electronics through the tube to spit out chunky, exotic machine funk. "Marinetti," named after the author of the Futurist Manifesto, shares its namesake's embrace of the disorientating potential of technology. Like a soundtrack to losing control of your car, it evokes the thrill and uncertainty of the new. Less successful are the album's more generic moments; "Tour Track" while pretty fails to take root in the subconscious in quite the same way as "Maximilian" which follows it with a bonkers deconstruction of stuttering dubstep.
If Marchment is a little too conscious of his forbears—even those most producers struggle to pronounce—the vision that begins to take shape on this record is one of a music that probes the possibilities of a digital language founded on the eccentricities of its analogue past. Who's Afraid... is at its best when this interplay is instinctive, when the memories of the future flow most fluently.
Tracklist 01. Schult-Abbey
02. Putney
03. Albers
04. Recorded
05. Marinetti
06. Countach Sound
07. Tour Track
08. Maximilian
09. Delia Dub
10. Brabham And Company
11. Anquetil
12. Horror Stories & Space Travel