- Since the '90s the Gescom moniker has been wielded like a proverbial invisibility cloak, shrouding a fluctuating band of producers. Although its members have managed to remain unidentifiable not only from record to record, but track to track, the trail invariably leads back to Manchester's Skam label—set up by Andy Maddocks and managed by Rob Hall—with Autechre's Sean Booth and Rob Brown placed firmly at its epicentre.
The Skull Snap EP is the first effort since 2007 from the mysterious outfit, another unsigned product this time for Skam's hip-hop sister label of the same name, and is a far cry from either Gescom's IDM lineage or Skull Snap's MC-favouring discography. Instead we have some strange concoction of the two: a collection of fuzzy, retro-broken beat, as if techno went rummaging through the hip-hop secondhand bin and pulled out five daring albeit slightly mothy ensembles. "Seventh Stone Triangle" and "Seventh Ace Deuce" could easily be from some '80s VHS-only sci-fi soundtrack, with the latter twisting ravey 'ardcore stabs into some post-apocalyptic shoulder-pad-clad theme tune. "Cake Mic" crushes the group's typically playful IDM frame into a growling murk of distortion, while "R Zee Oner Panix" is a marooned and rusted Gescom vehicle, clanking and spluttering back into life. "V Take Fastroll" concludes the EP in a suitably confusing fashion with a teasing dystopian techno loop just one minute and 26 seconds long. Definitely Gescom—being nothing else definite about it.
TracklistA1 Seventh Stone Triangle
A2 Cake Mic
B1 Seventh Ace Deuce
B2 R Zee Oner Panix
B3 V Take fastroll