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HALLUCINATOR - Landlocked
One of dub techno’s holiest relics is finally remastered and cut to vinyl for the first time following Chain Reaction’s cult ’99 metal-cased CD edition, hailing Basic Channel’s templates taken to mystic-poetic degrees by Black Audio Film Collective’s Edward George & Trevor Mathison, plus fellow writer-composer visionary Anna Piva. Trust it’s E-S-S-E-N-T-I-A-L techno dub tipped FFO 154’s ‘Strike’, Vainqueur, Suum Cuique, Short Span. What a trip‽!!! In the roiling wake of Mark Ernestus & Moritz Von Oswald’s foundational Basic Channel project (1993-1995), their Hardwax-derived label, Chain Reaction, hosted a wave of producers who pushed dub techno parameters to uniquely expressive, alchemic, and psychoacoustic ends, perhaps most famously through the labels most closely connected associates - Vainqueur, Porter Ricks, Monolake, Substance, Vladislav Delay and Torsten Pröfrock under many of his early monikers (Various Artists, Resilent etc). But the label’s final stretch would find a second wave of producers with even more opaque biographical detail. Shinichi Atobe was one (for many years assumed to be a made up name for one of the label’s regular avatars), Matrix were another, and then Hallucinator - a trio who were at the time introduced by the label with the following info - “3 people from the UK/London and this is their first release ever- that’s all what the artists want to let us know…. This record is dedicated to the memory of Stephen Lawrence!” Collecting the trio’s initial three EPs issued 1998-’99, ‘Landlocked’ would become the London trio of writer-composer/sound-designers’ sole, definitive LP statement; a dozen tracks held in highest cult regard for their grasp of dub-as-method uniquely defined by their embrace of inverted space and negative ecstasy and a coolly delirious style of elemental sorcery that saw dub techno elide spheres with farthest reaches of ambient metaphysics. Their revelations pierced the underground subconscious and spoke to what dub techno could be, parsing headier signals from club hedonism and emphasising the form’s potential as dematerialised, mystic noise for meditation with a deeply uncanny effect. Call it dub techno or techno dub: in the hands of Anna Piva, Edward George & Trevor Mathison, the paradigm is taken at its most malleable and ambiguous, craftily short-circuiting synaesthetic audio-visual senses, and using its abstracted nature as metaphor to convey extramusical themes; most notably the tragic and pivotal death of Stephen Lawrence in 1993, which helped usher a sea change in the law and multicultural relations that were also reflected in the developments of Black producer/DJ-led rave culture, as poetically codified by BAFC’s video essays, and in the radical, perceptive writings of Kodwo Eshun, by the time these records came out. In passage from the West African-via-Jamaican steppas rhythms of ‘People’, thru the sonorous slosh of its 10 min closer, ‘Landlocked’ flexes its animist magick in a singular diffusion of dub and techno semiotics. The chirality of dread heft to ‘Black Angel’ and effervescent levity in ‘Red Angel’ hail contrasts that play out across the set, from air-whisked turbo-step in ‘Phebes’ to Nyabinghi-rooted trodder ’Sethos’, and the eyes-down, vertiginous industrial steppa ‘Goldcoast’, to resonant experiments in psychoacoustics on ‘Wipeout I’ and ‘Recall (Wipeout II)’, or dub noise of ‘Rocket’ that each ideally mess with perceptions of texture, space, velocity, and proprioception. The result is a proper trip: 12 steeply immersive visions clocking in at an hour and fifteen minutes, balancing a clear sense of pre-millennial tension with more timeless, elusive dread that lingers phantasmic in its air-shuddering, concrète dynamics and brooding-to-romantic pathos. For so many of you lot - prayers have been answered.
