We wrote about 10-20’s debut album for the Highpoint Lowlife label a while back, dipping our ears into “the poison and pollution of a lifetime spent pondering numerous genres of electronica” and loving every last echo we found. Since then he’s released a series of landform EPs – geographically themed snapshots of a journey through dystopian landscape called ‘Island,’ ‘Lake’ and ‘Mountain’ - for the label, with the fourth and final installment, ‘Isthmus’ (apparently its a narrow strip of land connecting two larger land areas usually with waterforms on either side), due at some point in the next month.
Much like the eponymous album, much of the work on these releases channels numerous elements of sound; aligning whirrs you’d be accustomed to finding on Autechre records, with the static wash of Burial and the unquantized bump of Dabrye. Out of the three EPs already available ‘Lake’ is possibly the highlight, thanks in no small part to the disjointed mess that is ‘Endzone’ and the insistent post Dilla thump of ‘Boat’ when its given a telling sound designer’s overhaul. ‘Ishtmus’ only further displays 10-20’s ferocious talent for textures; merging the distorted greyscale static of Boards of Canada with his twisted version of a 2-step beat on ‘Halogen.’ The tear out white noise manipulation and ominous throb of ‘Athens’ follows, complete with typewritter chatter percussion, elongated chimes and trickles of awkward melody before it all subsides into the slow motion drum programming of ‘Zizec,’ its kick drums and disturbed chants bumping like it came straight out of a late nineties era Anticon producer’s MPC.
Ultimately these four releases build up the second essential as hell album from 10-20, a scary talent whose productions properly flesh out his noise heavy post-electronica ideas. Thanks to the kind people at HPLL you can download ‘Zizec’ in full glorious technisound here...
DOWNLOAD: 10-20 - Zizec [Exclusive Sonic Router download]
You can catch 10-20 alongside Roof Light at the first of HPLL's monthly parties this coming Thursday at the Big Chill Bar, London.
Links:
www.myspace.com/1020musik
www.highpointlowlife.com
