Fresh off his stunning Petrichor / Grainform single, Thelem returns to Artikal, delivering his most substantial release thus far. The ‘Haunted Harmonics’ EP splits itself between the grime-influenced ‘Haunted Harmonics’ and cyber-badman riddim of ‘Shottaz’ while stepping up the tempo to 170bpm with ‘Forces of Nature’’s agenda of agitation and the clinically paranoid ‘Obsessions’.
Haunted Harmonics unfolds like a demented Eski beat with squashed rudebwoy synths grafted to the rhythmic frame as a neon melodic line gets refracted into various shapes and permutations. A hip-hop indebted bass line carries all the micro-level details, till it all dissipates into a sound-collage of field recordings from various places, but most prominently a pre-recorded telephone message. The Babylon crumbling war drums of Forces of Nature open with snippets of a Rastafari portent regarding the sinners of the world before augmented with tastefully spliced amen breaks and dark-side swipes.
Blooming from delicately creeping pads and punctuated by rudebwoy threats, Shottaz explodes into a bio-mechanical steppa geared with hyper-surreal sound design, creating a constantly shifting mechanism of soundsystem destruction. Trapist percussion keeps things clipped and serious. Obsessions is a heads down roller possessing the shark-eyed mission to add a little bit of paranoia to the dance. Scuttling percussion flick and glimmer over reinforced moaning caustic synths and hard as nails swerving subs.
ARTKL013 will be released April 28th and is available to pre-order from the Artikal Music Store.
