Eats groove, eats bass

A. Busche | TAZ

“Specialism is secret society. And drum’n’bass has always cultivated its image as a secret science. The concealment tactics around means of production, the fetishization of exclusive dubplates and white labels, the deliberate making oneself scarce as an option to increase value, the almost ritualized research processes in the home laboratories of the “Beat Scientologists”, enriched with the theoretical ballast of Afrofuturistic concept derivatives and even more profane science fiction escapism; the burden of the self-imposed role of saviour (for electronic music) ultimately exceeded the competence of many programmers. And before anyone had even understood what had been put together in the studios, no one was interested anymore. The pro-tool elitists also revealed themselves to be just the water boilers of beat-making. Drum’n’Bass has already completed its first cycle.

In England, the deejays are celebrating the primitive old-school sound again, the old ragga samples are being unpacked, happy hardcore suddenly means more than Charly Lownoise & Mental Theo again. And in Berlin, Tim Elliot aka Current Value is sitting in his little room and has now brought a real beast into the world with his fourth album “Beyond Digits”.

An hour of drum’n’bass with a crowbar, no frills and stripped down to the essential functional units: Drum and bass. “Beyond Digits” hates intros; it eats grooves, bass and mids like a shredder and dryly hammers the anti-funk. Efficiency and harshness – the record doesn’t invite, it confronts. The shock-frozen bass roars at you; the steel-hardened drums don’t push, they beat out incessantly brutal syncopations. In the timbres of a numb, machinic cold, this engineering feat of drum ‘n’ bass album tells stories of paranoia and claustrophobia, alienation and isolation. A stylistically precise, abstract steel thunderstorm. Elliot, however, does not speak the secret language of drum’n’bass scientists. When there is talk of “drum’n’bass in Germany”, his name never comes up.

Current Value’s previous albums on Position Chrome had discredited him as a detail-obsessed Mad Scientist who screwed around in the structures of his tracks until they could have been put in any gallery. Complicated, abysmally dark machine jazz without a “base” connection; always an idea ahead of his label colleague Panacea, but without the potency of the latter’s testosterone breakbeats. Somehow more subtle. That’s over now.

The condensation on very basic dramaturgical principles of a drum-‘n’-bass track has brought ten metallic clattering breakbeat tools into shape on “Beyond Digits”. Pure essence. This return to power through reduction sounds like tabula rasa for drum’n’bass. Everything back to the beginning. The fact that the record is not released on a drum’n’bass label this time is the final consequence. After Kat Kosm’s Folktronics and the compilation “American Breakbeats”, Sonic Dragolgo’s gabba-pop album “Don’t Stop the Music” is released almost simultaneously on the Berlin label Klangkrieg Rec. As someone who is still marginalized, he seeks the proximity of other marginalized people. For him, this is not an ideological decision, but rather a pragmatic one. Elliot finds his way to higher goals in a roundabout way; his modular synthesizer, the origin of the atmospheric gloom in the backdrops of his reverb room, is considered antiquated in the “scene”.

Elliot emphasizes that the pseudo-futuristic peculiarities of his sound – without manga clichés and cyber kitsch – stem precisely from careful research on the prehistoric device. With “Beyond Digits”, he has achieved the long-desired science-fiction of drum’n’bass.