Facebook Slider

EPROM - Drone Warfare

  • Published in UNX

I don’t know much about electronic music but I know what I like. EPROM is from Portland, Oregon and a rising star in the American scene. You may know him from his work with Alix Perez, working together as Shades. Drone Warfare was released on Perez’ own label, 1985.

This is EPROM’s third EP of 2017, following on from ‘Pineapple’, and the ‘Acid Disk’ collaboration with G Jones. His prodigious output is all the more impressive when you know that he has pledged his Bandcamp profits from 2017 to Planned Parenthood in resistance to President Trump’s clampdown on abortion and family planning.

His music might lazily be referred to as EDM, but this isn't dancing music unless you dance like a malfunctioning android. This work lies somewhere between the glitchy experimentalism of Aphex Twin and the homebrewed squelches of Deadmaus. In the absence of vocal hooks, there’s a vibe redolent of the former’s Selected Ambient Works collection but, with a modern approach to producing that brings the Canadian with the oversized rodent helmet to mind. It’s closer in spirit to Nightmares On Wax than to Daft Punk.

‘Oksana’ has a slippery, skittering bass amid atmospheric, eastern vocalisations. The title track builds the anticipation with distorted, harmonising synths building to some head-melting lead lines. It’s the type of track that would get you dirty looks and probably kicked off the decks at a house party. It is a glorious testament to the evolution of electronic music that, within a generation of hitting the mainstream, the genre can spawn acts as divergent as EPROM and, say, Avicii.

Drone Warfare sounds like the type of music that robots would grind to in a dystopian underground club, in a world where humans have oppressed robo-culture, and this is their only release from the relentless toil. The uprising starts tonight. Death to humans!

I guess what I’m saying is: yeah, it’s damn good.

Read more...
Subscribe to this RSS feed