G.H. / Ground EP

Modern Love

G.H. is Gary Howell, longtime associate of Modern Love as one half of Pendle Coven and sometime contributor to the HATE project. The Ground EP features Howell's first material produced outside of Pendle Coven and takes on a much darker, more stripped down aesthetic - making use of location recordings amassed over the last decade. The title track extends over 7 minutes from a solitary bass pulse into a slow, three dimensional industrial reduction heaving with uncomfortable bass weight and a sense of nervous expectation. It's like the bare, skeletal noise framework for darkest junglist hardcore stripped of its percussion - all bar a bass drum and intense shards of noise. Albedo has more of a swing to it, dominated by a growling bassline and the metallic clunk of disjointed percussion at odds with the squashed funk lurking somewhere at its core. The template is extended on Earth, a brilliantly discordant club variant that sounds like an R&B mastertrack exploded into 100 constituent parts and put together not entirely in the right order. It builds and collapses into itself, a stylistic oddity that at one and the same time brings to mind Boards of Canada's re-working of Colonel Abrams' 'Trapped' and the extreme frequency vortex of the Raster Noton label.

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