Ken Downie is a long-term techno magus. His current work as THE BLACK DOG has a ten year history at least and the people who know about the UK electronic music scene will fill you in on all the comings and goings with PLAID, Warp and more besides. Current collaborators Martin and Richard Dust seem to have provided a welcoming home for Downie's current resurgence. As Dust Science Recordings they keep their dark materials in the steel ghost town of Sheffield.
But I'm no historian and no electronica expert (see below!). As a reviewer I'm a music dilettante with no fixed abode and no specialist subjects. All I can tell you about is what I hear.
For one thing this is a slow album. The tempos are way down in the resting pulse rate zone. Maybe one good coffee after waking. Or one average cocoa before sleep. The incremental development from penny plain in early tracks to tupenny coloured in the closers is sympathetically paced. Without narcotics I have found continuous concentration almost impossible. Not much happens, despite the vast work involved in constructing 18 tracks of delicately positioned filigree sound. I feel almost ashamed to have to admit this. Only the distorted time sense induced by drugs could really make any sense of this work. The richest psychedelic music induces it’s own trance. Music like this seems to demand trance as a precondition.
Each track has a steady set of repetitive elements and the technical templates imposed by computer tools. Added on are samples of synthesised surprises of scratchy or harmonic textures. I can imagine a randomiser that worked each of the tracks up from a collection of patches. Nowhere do I detect a human sense of humour, wisdom, anger or love. Like a book of William Morris wallpaper patterns, each item is a work of craft and intense care, but nothing adds up to a story, a room or even a mood. I sense only bleakness, anonymity, isolation and withdrawl.
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One exception would be the natural metronome, with bell and click, followed by a five note phrase the lightens the start of "Machine Machina", buried in the heart of the set. At one and a half minutes, that outburst of communicativeness, that near-contact, seems to have been too much for Dowie to bear. And we’re soon pushed back into the swathes of truculence and denial. OK, we get one or two painfully beautiful reprieves. The early bars of "Songs for Other People" would be a splendid example, with a strings sample that evokes memories of GORECKI'S "Sorrowful Songs". But I'm really having to work at this to bring you some light from a dark place.
"Silenced" sits on that uncomfortable line between misunderstood genius and artless mechanics that each listener must resolve on a one-to-one basis.
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