- On this rare instrumental album, Kevin Martin strips and slows beats down to see how deep he can go.
- What happens when you slow a record down? "You can hear the innards of the sound," the drone artist Sarah Davachi said. "Other things start appearing," said Philip Jeck, the late experimental composer. "When you all fucked up, it be soundin' weird," said Mike-D of Houston group Southside Playaz. All true. Slowness heightens definition, amplifies the inaudible and, crucially, immerses you in a fun-house dimension that's familiar but strange. But let's not forget its most obvious effect: it plunges low frequencies even further into the depths.
The Bug—real name Kevin Martin—brings all these tricks to bear on Machine, a compilation of EPs he produced as ammunition for his Berlin sound system party, Pressure. (There's also a two-CD version with an extra half-hour of music.) With synths that stretch like taffy and sub bass so low you don't hear so much as feel it, these ultra sparse dub instrumentals evoke the pitch-shifted warble of a 45-RPM record played at 33. Martin is well known for cranking the intensity level to unknown heights, fusing the full-body maximalism of bands like Swans or Sunn O))) with the sound clash imperative to kill a soundboy tonight. This time, however, the British producer strips and slows the beat down to see how deep he can go.
Much of Martin's work for the last decade has let emotions take the lead, especially his collaborative vocal albums. Fire (2021) captured the pent-up frustration of Covid lockdowns; Solitude (2019) by his group King Midas Sound, was a poetic meditation on loss; Angels & Devils (2014) seethed with a general disenfranchised rage. Machine, as the name might suggest, is as cold as a stethoscope, avoiding touchstones like dread, desire or depression in favour of a more ambiguous mood. Free of the narrative and emotional content that vocalists bring to the beat, we get to savour what he does best: huge basslines booming in a cavernous atmosphere.
In many ways, it revives the ethos of the Macro Dub Infection anthologies he compiled for Virgin back in '95 and '96. Spanning trip-hop, techno, breakbeat and then some, his pair of scene surveys presented dub as an expansive genre that "leaves a lot of space for the imagination to explore,” he told Electronic Beats. On the Machine opener, "Annihilated," he leaves so much space that the reverb and delay seem to become instruments of their own. With spartan drums oozing along at a viscous 43 BPM, you might even find it a bit plodding—it's hard to establish a groove with this much room between beats.
Martin never strays from this horror sci-fi template, even as the tempo moves up and down, creating a cohesion that makes small distinctions pop. The genre-defiant "Shafted," one of the album's clear standouts, pairs the crunchy chug of a Trent Reznor production with the haunted ambience of Demdike Stare. "Hypnotised" harkens back to the late-'00s golden age of Dubstep Allstars mixes, with space-echo minor chords wafting over a classic steppers rhythm. "Drop" and "Buried" are the ones most likely to induce head-banging and bass face. The Hoover-style synth line on "Buried," saturated to within an inch of its life, is intimidating in exactly the way it’s supposed to be, mixing pleasure with a fear that the vibrations might kill you.
This is often what people remark upon when they experience The Bug, especially on a rig as powerful as the one he uses at his Pressure parties: there's a transcendent extremity to it all. But the remarkable thing about him has always been his mix of aggression and restraint. Machine is as visceral as anything he's ever put out, but the album's use of negative space—a cornerstone of what, in that Electronic Beats interview, he identified as dub's "alien unknown quality"—creates a sense of heightened focus you don't get from his vocal albums. These tracks are certainly "floor weapons," as Martin has billed them in liner notes. But they'll work just as well for those looking to quietly meditate on bassweight at home.
Tracklist01. Annihilated (Force of Gravity)
02. Shafted (Laws of Attraction/Repulsion)
03. Sickness (Slowly Dying)
04. Vertical (Never See You Again)
05. Floored (Point of Impact)
06. Drop (Machine Sex)
07. Hypnotised (F-cked up)
08. Inhuman (Let Machines Do The Talking
09. Departed (Left The Body Behind)
10. Buried (Your Life is Short)
11. Bodied (Send For the Hearse)
12. Exit (Wasteman)