‘Berceuse Heroique back in the fray with the first of three twelves serenading sound system culture. An invocation of the long-lost spirits of pure, heavyweight, hardcore hedonism.
‘Border Control is a fight anthem against Brexit, fusing the industrial slant of Brummie techno with the jungle techno pressure of the early nineties. The Dillinja-esque bassline of Fortune Teller tolls the death knell for all tin pan speakers. Loose Cables is an uncanny ringer for one of Pinch’s most underrated tunes, The Attack Of The Killer Robot Spiders.
‘Pinch runs the voodoo down one more time. He sounds totally pissed off and more fresh than ever.’

The two dubstep pioneers at the top of their game. Truly an album, the music is multi-levelled — dark as anything at times, but engrossingly varied and emotionally shaded, always on the move.

Extra to the LP, with a magnificent, epic, head-scrambling remix, more spaced and spooked than the original. Shackleton’s dream liturgy fully unfolds — an eerie, garbled sublimity, a kind of black-magic plainsong.

Remixes by Beatrice Dillon and Peder Mannerfelt.

No-one else makes music like this: devilishly complex but warm and intuitive, stirring together a dizzying assembly of outernational and outerspace influences, whilst retaining the subby funk-and-hot-breath pressure of Shackleton’s soundboy, club roots.
The result is an evolutionary, truly alchemical music — great shifting tides of dub, minimalist composition and choral song (Five Demiurgic Options); ritual spells to ward off the darkness (Before The Dam Broke, The Prophet Sequence); radiophonia and zoned-out guitar improv (Seven Virgins); even the febrile, freeform psychedelia of eighties noise rock (Sferic Ghost Transmits / Fear The Crown).
Over the five years since Music For The Quiet Hour, Vengeance’s vocal and lyrical range has rolled out across this new terrain. Throughout these six transmissions he’s hoarse preacher, sage scholar and ravaged bluesman; blind man marching off to war, and exhausted time-traveller warning of impending socio-ecological catastrophe.
Six dialogic accounts of our conflicted times, then, expanding beyond the treacly unease of the duo’s early collaborative work into something subtler and more emotionally shattering — its shades of brightness more dazzling, and its darkness even murkier.
“We almost didn’t hear it when the foundations went.”

Shackleton’s most expansive, ecstatic and hallucinatory music to date. Four extended excursions channeling Congotronics way to the east, with an aura of restrained mania reminiscent of the feral pomp and gallows humour of Coil’s moon-musick phase.
The pairing with Tomasini is a match made in heaven. Swooping from deep growl to piercing falsetto, his four-octave voice both heightens the taste for the theatrical that’s always been integral to Shackleton’s music, and makes explicit the latter’s kinship to the occult energies of the UK’s post-industrial underground.
As the title suggests, these are shadowy songs rich with allusions to bodily ritual and psychic exploration, with Tomasini’s lyrics framed by luminous whirls of hand-struck drums and synthetic gamelan, bells and tumbling organ melodies, all earthed by dubwise bass. You Are The One escalates from delicate choral chant to full-bore psychedelic organ freakout; Rinse Out All Contaminants is a slow incantation, to purge all negative thoughts; the melodies of Father You Have Left Me are smudged like early Steve Reich, then burned out by snarling subs; and the magnificent Twelve Shared Addictions balances elliptical melodies like spinning plates, gradually unfurling into a breakneck storm of voice and hammered keys.

Signature Shackleton — paranoia flaring into dancefloor fire, gripping and rolling. With a chilled and crackling King Midas Sound, Hitomi forlorn. And finally The Bug himself, digital only, getting in your face.

A malevolent scorcher, with Middle Eastern percussion harking back to Hamas Rule; a ravening, scrabbling T++ remix. And a new departure — rich and spry, computer-unbound — with a truly epic, stunning Mordant.

Featuring James Massiah from Babyfather.
The flip is pure terror, with John T. Gast in the mix; heavier than lead, dreader than dread.

‘Perhaps the first time he has chosen to showcase the full range of his skills. The set is intoxicatingly rich and, with a couple of exceptions, largely downbeat… Sonically there’s much more variation — if not in the pace of the riddims, then certainly the instrumentation and textures — making it St. Hilaire’s most approachable album for non-dub-techno aficionados… A modern master whose importance and influence can now — though long overdue — be fully recognised’ ((Steve Barker, The Wire).

Well-crafted, feeling variations of bass, UK garage and house, drum and bass and the rest.

Torsten Profrock’s occult homage to UK garage.
Two-step waylaid in the scuffed, churning, sub-heavy terrain running from his Chain Reaction days to Monolake, mysteriously entangled with the distressed tracks of old Ugandan 78s.

We love this film. Warmly recommended.

Thirteen brand new instrumentals from the Newham General.