Audio Journal : 22/04/2011

This week I've been catching up with the work of David Fleet, aka M075, 75 Surveillance and Laica. For some fairly logical reason, when I saw the various aliases and the reference to 'surveillance', and titles like 'Cosy Funk' and 'Audio Out' I was reminded of the work of Cabaret Voltaire co-founder Richard H. Kirk. Kirk, whose music began as harsh industrial noise with the Cabs slowly and deliberately evolved into something more purist, much more electronic. His solo work alongside the Cabs releases was initially as harsh as his dayjob, a far cry from the multi-cultural dub ambience of his later Nineties work for Warp, or the early rave of Sweet Exorcist. There are many other aliases that Kirk has used, including Electronic Eye, whose LPs were adorned with grainy images of nascent CCTV technology, hellish signals of that word I picked out, 'surveillance'.

Fleet's Bandcamp page contains a number of tracks which I've been enjoying since I downloaded them about a month ago. Apart from making me feel nostalgic about Richard H Kirk and Cabaret Voltaire, I've also found Fleet's music reminding me of many great electronica artists from the Nineties, where artists like Plastikman (Richie Hawtin), Luke Slater, and Photek, as well as the likes of Autechre, dragged me away from listening to electronic pop.

That's not to say that Fleet's music isn't original; far from it. The major boon here is the eclectic restlessness of Fleet's music, with tracks moving from skeletal Hawtin-esque beats ('Riddime' from MO75's Suppress), to post-industrial electronic body music in the vein of Nine Inch Nails or Nitzer Ebb ('Hell Machine' from MO75's Surrender), to frozen ambience (Laica's Kos tracks), to electro that sounds like it's being played through shattered glass ('Anderson's Ground' from 75 Surveillance's Honed), as perfected by Link, Plaid and Aphex Twin.

'Audio Out' (from Surrender) has a pattern of scarce beats that sounds like dropping a pingpong ball on a glass-topped table, while 'Cosy Funk' (from Honed) has a fidgety, ricocheting electronic dub rhythm and deep bassy sounds; it's like an otherworldly electro funk, hence the name. The longform 'Puls (Complete)' by Laica is a 19-minute ambient epic, much like Global Communication soundtracking a Clive Barker movie. Dark industrial sounds evolve out of clouds of noxious ambience while uptight dub beats drift in and out. It's engaging, absorbing and all those sorts of words.

Fleet kindly sent me an instrumental demo version of his take on Depeche Mode's 'See You', highlighting his ability to turn in electronic pop as well as the array of styles mentioned above.

It seems vaguely odd to be writing about downloads in the wake of Record Store Day 2011. That's mainly because I didn't participate in supporting independent record shops on 16 April, though I would have liked to. There were a number of highly limited items from artists that I like being made available, but instead I elected to spend my morning ferrying my two girls to various Saturday activities and parties. In the trade-off between records and my kids, my kids won the day. I couldn't be bothered with the queuing on the day, nor the sixteen mile drive to my nearest record shop, to be honest.

Does that make me a traitor to the cause?