Blawan
SickElixir
XL
Western club music is in a strange place right now. The days of constant evolution, when the genre—on both sides of the Atlantic—blossomed from disco to techno to house to drum ’n’ bass to garage to dubstep, are gone. Whereas across Africa and South America new styles are sporadically still emerging, a new Western subgenre of dance music hasn’t really grabbed the mass consciousness in well over a decade now, certainly not like similar movements once did in more hedonistic decades gone by.
Forcefully kicking back against this strange stasis is Blawan, the North English DJ and producer who’s been around the rave scene since the early 2010s and has subsequently been lumped in with that era’s post-dubstep/future-bass sound. Interestingly, that fairly nebulous subgenre now looks like something of a forerunner among the genre-hopping, non-linear approach that many DJs are adopting today. In the past decade or so, as he’s grown into one of Europe’s most in-demand DJs, Blawan’s only put out one full-length album of original work as a solo artist. But now he’s back (following a stint working on a rural English dairy farm) and has signed to XL Recordings to release his second LP.
A dense, monolithic collection, SickElixir sits somewhere between industrial techno, post-dubstep, and IDM. None of these tags neatly fit—it’s too much fun, too aggressive, and too generous in its tone, respectively. Like the strange image adorning the album’s cover, its color palette is myriad forms of black and grey, but plastered with frequent splotches of intense primary colors. These take the forms of footwork rhythms that skitter atop unpredictable distortion (“Style Teef”), menacing-yet-exhilarating demonic vocal/bass hybrid rhythms (“WTF”), fractured melodies that shatter like a crystalline window into a million pieces (“Birf Song”), and synths that hit with such force that you can feel your chest taking the weight of their stabbing motions (“Creature Brigade”).
These 14 tracks offer further evidence that Blawan is among the world’s best musicians when it comes to making electronic music that you can tangibly feel with your whole body. Of course, his way of showing this is via brash intensity. SickElixir is a true speaker-blower of an album; you can practically see the sound waves emerging like needles made out of some impossibly heavy alien alloy. The monstrous weight of even a less relentless (by the album’s skewed standards) track like the Autechre-in-hell “During Elevation” possesses this immense sense of heft, as if gravity affects you differently on planet SickElixir.
Parts of Blawan’s sensational second full-length are properly mind-melting; however, it never loses its sense of pure rave fun in the way that some abstract electronica willfully does. The savage pressure that these tracks employ means that they frequently feel as though they’re lifting your limbs for you and setting you off in some hideous yet thrilling puppet-on-a-string routine. Listening to this audacious but lovingly crafted return, you’ll never want your strings to be cut, regardless of whether there’s any clubs left for you to perform your Danse Macabre within.
