Black Atlantic bring the heat. Alex Martin reports from the Instra:Mental album launch.
The launch of Instra:mental’s hotly anticipated debut LP, ‘Resolution 653’, strikes me as an exceptionally well curated and sonically interesting party. In the underground warehouse space below Shoreditch’s Citipost Building, we're to be treated to sounds both contemporary and vintage, visionary and revivalist, from the globally renowned beat-making hotbeds of Detroit, Germany and London.
The line-up is eclectic, fearlessly straddling a rich variety of bpms, production aesthetics and epochs. But it's the coherent narrative that emerges in spite of the diversity of geographic and scene-related backgrounds on display that I'm most excited by. This night celebrates the fruitful cross-pollination of dnb, techno and electro as much as it does the release of a new LP.
First up is Kassem “the boss” Mosse, an emerging and extremely talented peddler of techno and IDM from Leipzig. Although at this point Citipost’s subterranean caverns are verging on the eerily empty, I'm immediately drawn into his set. This takes the form of a series of densely-layered soundscapes, commonly constructed from live drum samples and metallic reverb, which are propelled steadily forwards by an undergirding tribalistic stomp, and punctuated by indulgently drawn-out, cacophonic, percussive crescendos.
Mosse’s sound chimes ideally with the warehouse's interior structure, and his set meets with some wholeheartedly appreciative beard-stroking, even if not a great deal in the way of boogie, from a crowd now swelling rapidly in advance of the arrival at the decks of the men of the hour – the genre-definitive Instra:mental duo.
Boddika plays first, his impact aggrandised by a significant increase in both tempo and volume, as the soundsystem is ratcheted up in fanfare to the night’s headliners, and the pulsating beats of his minimal dnb and bombastic, technoid electro begin to take hold of a very receptive dancefloor.
This is the first time I’ve heard material from the new LP, and the selection Boddika plays from it sounds excellent. But what is for me the stand-out track at first listen is saved for Jon Convex’s section of the Instra:mental set: it features the most lavish use of vocals I've heard on one of their tunes since 2009’s infectious ode to voyeurism, 'Watching You'. I almost feel like heading home early to download Resolution 653, so that I can undertake a more listener-led absorption of the project in a comfortable chair; these fleeting snippets are pregnant with promise.
When balaclava-clad Detroit collossus DJ Stingray bowls up and steals the show, as if at gunpoint, I'm very, very glad I stuck around. Introduced to a new audience (me amongst its number) by his recent mix for Fact Magazine as Urban Tribe, Stingray has been in the game for almost 20 years now. His music is as big and scary as he looks; dread-laden and paranoiac, unrelenting and militaristic. He opens with more than a minute of tinnitus-simulating, high-pitched wailing – the migraine skank, Underground Resistance style. Over the course of the next hour he whips the floor into a terrifying frenzy, evoking a dialogue between a robotic puppeteer and a dancing cyborg.
It is the juxtaposition of this darkside futurism with the sass of his booty-shakin’ breakbeats (à la ‘Silicon Romance’) that makes his set so compelling – and danceable. Having been chewed up and eventually spat out, pouring with sweat, by Detroit’s baddest, I head for some respite in the smoking area, which very much resembles the post-apocalyptic landscape that Stingray’s productions evoke.
In the main room below, dBridge begins, to considerable rapture. Reverting, on the whole, to a more orthodox dnb template than that adhered to by Instra:mental, his set is less experimental than the rest of the night’s fare, but markedly more accessible, ensuring Citipost remains almost full until closing. Rolling out belters of the pre-Autonomic era, in the vein of the imperious 'True Romance', feels like the perfect way to round off the night.
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