ATAXIA

Album review

Rian Treanor's debut full-length follows several EPs that introduced the artist's acute, angular brand of deconstructed club music. His primarily improvised tracks strip the sharp rhythms of grime and garage to their skeletal essence, yet keep them hyperkinetic enough to work as club tracks. He has also detoured into more explicitly arty territory; 2018's RAVEDIT included his butcherings of Whigfield's '90s Euro-dance hit "Saturday Night" as well as '80s synth pop staples by Yello and Yazoo. Still, Treanor's music is typically far more danceable than the work of his father, sound artist and glitch pioneer Mark Fell (SND). ATAXIA is purposefully more focused and structured than his prior releases, allowing more color into the picture while also making the rhythms more unpredictable, bringing to mind the spontaneity of the algorave movement. There's also a sense of absurdity and playfulness to these tracks, ensuring that things don't get too eggheaded. The opening track features a somewhat silly spoken passage that resembles a more candid version of Peder Mannerfelt's "Evening Redness in the West," leading into a harder, more complex beat sequence. The unabashedly chipper "ATAXIA_B2" dices the voice of Pakistani playback singer Nahid Akhtar, while the more downbeat "ATAXIA_D3" shuffles a yearning soul sample to form the phrase "people don't understand people." "ATAXIA_A2" is a direct, commanding grime mutation, almost entirely consisting of headstrong bass explosions and dizzying crystalline tones. Other tracks bear traces of footwork, singeli, and other 21st century dance styles that take radical approaches to constructing rhythms. Dense and nearly overwhelming at times but always following a linear progression, ATAXIA is an exciting, challenging release that charts an advanced evolution of dance culture.

© Paul Simpson /TiVo