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It's all very mod-errrrn, but on 'Hard Islands', the parameters, the peripheries that Nathan Fake was pushing at on 'Drowning In A Sea Of Love' have been rent in favour of the oppressive regime of 4x4 ubiquity. 'Hard Islands', hard surfaces more like. 'Drowning In A Sea Of Love' felt like a work drawn from memories - a re-tread of synth-rock with vintage synths, junior Casio, and a lot of leftfield experimentalism that took soundscaping into undrafted polyphonic areas. Live, he'd beef his sound and provide an audio-visual cup-cake. Lots of people's ears were duly pricked, and rightly so. The Norfolk-born Fake was but 22 years old with the electronic scene his glass onion.
Then followed extended post-music school tours alongside Squarepusher,and Kieran Hebden and Steve Reid. Now 25, and his follow-up album 'Hard Islands', has a toughened programming held together by a tech-house zeitgeist tedium that was born from Fake's ticking off the club circuits around the world. The club audience is his buzz, and on 'Hard Islands' the aim is the dance-floor (and the loos are shocking). Soundscapes feel nailed in abeyance to pre-fab beats, modulated spurs wrestled to a framework of mdf techno assaults.
The warbly, pulsing sequencers of 'The Turtle' feel obedient to the 4x4 fascism of time frames as vintage Moog-y business makes for an Magic Roundabout of the dance-floor, while 'The Curlew' is a short piece of digi-noodle. The shrill, modulated organ-grinding of the minimalist Boards Of Canada-esque 'Basic Mountain' feel like early 70's forays into synthesised sound - it's weirdy, and time-travelly, and likely to clear a dance-floor. It could also garner bemused faces as persons unnamed realise just what junket they've taken. Some really good twangy bits at the end though, like ruler twangs on a table feel shot through Neptune's orbit. 'Fentiger' with its' acidy-tech-house takes time to build - a work of acid and bassy throbs with direction-changes, there's the all too-late signals of Fake's repro-trademarks in vintage noodliness and modulations.
'Narrier' is the thumper!! Possibly a deliberate mis-spelling of Harrier, it brings the sonic menace of the fighter plane to mind as it rips through the skies and realities, dropping cluster-fucks of bombardment. All wonderfully psychotic! Fake explores thunderous, firmament-trembling sequencers over a minimal beat, while chilling synth harmonies and the menace of the bassy about- to-drop-a-load-terror feels imminent. It's a head-fuck even in domesticity and should be unleased on an unsuspecting population.
'Castle Rising' is so much gloop though with a minimal Isolee-like appeal - the fizzing sequencers and battle drawn blasts of sythns emerge like a several headed Hydra vying for prey enclosed in a digi play-pen. If this is the future, I'll take the past. Weighing in at a near 9 minutes of so much wierd crusty dancefloor antics, it's best appreciated with an acid spike.
There's a coldness with all this shiny metallic surface of programming that is best appreciated in the uncritical melee of the dance-floor twigged to some hey-ho biscuits. The leftfield explorations into the foray felt pioneering on 'Drowning In A Sea Of Love', original and necessary. 'Hard Islands' is more a Drowning in A Sea of Teutonic Wankery. The uninitiated will be indifferent, the dance-floor bemused, and tech-jocks wrestling with weird epiphanies.
