The staccato assault of Endgame’s synth-blip reggaeton skitters as a machine in communion with human ritual. The machine doesn’t acknowledge or fetishize the formal specifics of courtship, club-ship, or social cue — rather, it sputters and rips apart the club like a spinning force extending its cold steel and automated movements mightily against the weak flesh of bodies gyrating in ecstasy. Endgame’s spartan style evokes images of masterless machines encircling and tormenting vulnerably human rituals by soldering together culture-hybridizations of Jamaican, Latin American, Portuguese, and U.K. rhythms into strict, violent mech-fire.
Savage EP’s clean palette production style presents these sounds like the exposed parts of such a machine — frayed wires shoot precise surges of pure club energy into hygienically spotless rhythms, giving them enough momentum to outrun 2016. Careful attention is paid to keeping melody refined to pointillistic, 3-note phrases that express scant emotion — they ricochet over intensely rigid rhythms and decorate an otherwise unrelenting forward motion. Occasionally, a pad will fill the white-space with liquid grey-toned ambience; yet, even still, the motion is silenced by the machine-like precision of Endgame’s explicit production style.
Kyselina’s stunning artwork serves as Savage EP’s muse — a tormented machine — a machine perhaps forced to live in communion with strange cultures it never understood. Still, it danced until it destroyed the club/ritual space. Perhaps it ripped itself apart and flailed violently until its body hung from chains exposed from the club’s demolished infrastructure. Its wires sparked and twisted into grotesque shapes until it slowly died in nihilist club fervor, aggressively baring its parts in rhythm to an unknown music.
Savage EP is out on Purple Tape Pedigree. They recently announced HYBRD02, the second installment of an experimental club night held at Trans Pecos featuring DJ NJ Drone, Mind Club Worldwide, Letta, Coyote Records, SHYBØI, KUNQ, and CELESTIAL TRAX & Roosevelt Rozay Labeija.
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