Like a true sound sculptor, BFTT bends, breaks, cuts, glues together and reassembles his sound material making it sound scarily hyper-realistic.
Despite the obvious flirtation with the dancefloor (the track ‘Disp’ being my favourite club weapon on offer), there is an intimate quality to his productions, reflected in his artistic choices – be it quirky vocal samples, fragments from YouTube videos or personal recordings – making it a rewarding, albeit intense candidate for armchair listening sessions. The product of four years of personal discovery, Redefines comes across as a culmination of BFTT’s adventurous sonic explorations found on labels like AD 93, Gobstopper and Polity. Similarly, the beats – where present – can feel gutted, like they’re missing a vital percussive element that will link the whole groove together this fragmentation means they seem jagged and spiny, sticking out at right angles from the skeletal ambient workouts. Even the song titles – various temperatures celsius – seem designed to dislocate you from any preconceptions about the music. There’s something enjoyably knotty and awkward about this debut release. With this new record, which Butler has said took longer to make than previous Hercules & Love Affair releases, he has explained that he wanted to explore themes atypical of dance music.Īlthough the music of Loraine James – one of the hottest electronic prospects in Britain to come along in the last five years – usually evokes a basement club, the air thick with deadened kick drums and busy, chuntering percussion, her new Whatever The Weather project seems to gesture towards something cleaner and airier, though with less of a sense of place.
Adopting a far more sombre tone than his usual infectious dance numbers, Butler summons a gothic air which permeates the record and heightens the darkness underpinning much of the work. It’s the most musically stark and affecting work of his career. Now happily residing in Ghent, Andy Butler closes a five-year gap between albums with a masterful turn with
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