Uitgebracht
November 2011
- Winter has arrived; a time for audio retreat. Into that indoor withdrawal, fittingly, arrives the second full-length of the Tibetan-Swiss producer and eerie chanteuse, Kate Wax. A scant six years after her debut album for Mental Groove, Reflections of the Dark Heat, Wax returns with her first LP for Border Community with a little audio aid from label head, James Holden. After recording the album in Switzerland, Wax headed to London to mix the album in Holden's studio. Unsurprisingly, the resulting record bears not only the trancey arpeggiations and deep night atmospheres of Holden's own productions and mixes but the frontiering sonic expansions of BC crewmembers like Luke Abbott and Ricardo Tobar.
But, for all those surface similarities, Wax's album is also unlike anything else the label's ever been associated with. Occupying the same wind-howl climes of artists like Fever Ray or Planningtorock, Dust Collision is a record of almost gothic stateliness and remove. It's the kind of album you can't help but hear as some alt-universe soundtrack to John Carpenter's The Thing.
Unlike the daytrip electronica and warm hobo techno around which the label's formed its band, there's a distance to the sonic bedding here, as though Wax is most comfortable from the other end of a telephone line. "Human Twin," for example, opens with Wax's treated vocals sort of drizzled over slow piano stabs and spliced vocals, constructed around empty and dimly-lit places, while "I Knit You" moves from one of Holden's trademarked arpeggiations into an arcing vocal line that's somehow pleading and desperate but, still, remote. Atop soft squalls of dissonance and glass clinking, "Archetype," meanwhile, is like a creepy torch song transmitted from some German industrial wasteblock, while the sonic restraint that opens "Track Five" gives way to a stumbling percussive break that inverts the joyousness of Kate Bush's "Hounds of Love" into a cold claustrophobic stomp.
That said, little of Dust Collision bounces like classic Border Community. Mining a trend set by standouts from the last few years like Coloured in Memory and Holkham Drones, its rhythms are understated, not backbones but appendages. There are still those moments of push though, especially on the album's second half, and they help to offset some of the record's gloomy, introspective crawl. "Dust Collision" rides another of Holden's warbling, heat-dizzy synthesizer runs through a fuzzy Martian landscape, and "For a Shadow" folds a subtle electro-strut into offsetting tonal patterns and one of Wax's most untreated and affecting vocal performances on the album. "Echoes and Light" stumbles through a choppy, mistimed beat and Italo synth into Wax's exotic drawl mouthing unknowables as forlorn and lost as the backing track: "She has come with a little gun / The beast is clever." Huh.
Dust Collision succeeds for the elegance and foreign ambience of its wintry atmosphere; it's easily the strongest effort yet from an artist we might easily have assumed had moved on to other ventures. As yet another attempt by Holden and co to expand BC's sonic terrain, it's a bold and often bewitching effort. A new album from Border Community is a rare treat indeed after all; Dust Collision holds enough unexplored pockets and moments of sly intrigue to hold us for the label's next endeavor.
Tracklist 01. I Knit You
02. Dancing On Your Scalp
03. Human Twin
04. Archetype
05. Maze Rider (Live From The Cave)
06. For A Shadow
07. Dust Collision
08. Echoes And The Light
09. Green Machine
10. Holy Beast
11. Mad Thinker Get Out
12. Les Djinns