10-20
10-20
HPLL034
Highpoint Lowlife 2009
08 Tracks. 50mins26secs

Buy: iTunes

Hailing from Devon, in the South West corner of England, the mysteriously named 10-20 is a music producer who has just dropped something of a bombshell with his self-titled digital-only debut album, released on London-based Highpoint Lowlife. In just eight tracks, he sketches an intense, often oppressive, universe, cut from dark soundscapes and coarse electronics which are assembled into complex patterns and applied over broken urban beats. These seem as far removed from the tranquil countryside and wild coastal nature of Devon, anchored instead in some suffocating industrial wasteland, where decay and rust are common currency.

Processing dense sonics and beats into toxic compositions, infiltrating them with subterranean bass, the mastermind behind this paranoid soundtrack clearly takes great pleasure in pushing the boundaries of contemporary electronic music to accommodate his vision. The album resonates with fragments of dubstep, glitch, ambient and dub, condensed into surprisingly organic and rich seismic tracks. Waves of electronics come crashing on chaotic beats, sending constant ripples down to the deepest, darkest corners of this album. Occasionally, human voices, crushed and processed into minute splinters, appear to call for help, but they cannot pierce through the wall of sound that forms the outer shell of these compositions.

As is de rigeur in abstract electronic records, the titles are somewhat irrelevant here and rarely amount to anything more than unpronounceable strings of letters. If anything, they serve to highlight the utterly post-industrial nature of this record. Yet, what 10-20 manages to create here is an unexpectedly hypnotic and evocative journey, fuelled by strong melodies and dreamy backdrops. This is especially the case on the intense jjuvxszla, which relentlessly pulsates from one end to the other as its backbone slowly gathers new layers, or on the opening piece, milvus, as its sparse melody snakes its way through vast ambient reverbs to wrap itself around a minimal beat. On InB, the dreamy undertones of the melody creates an interesting contrast with the grit of the statics and clicks, while on arcadeagle, 10-20 plays it is with a dubbey formation reminiscent of Si-Cut.db.

If Aphex Twin was for a moment contemplating reinventing dubstep, he probably wouldn’t go any other way than that adopted on this album. Influences are palpable, but they are so intricately woven into the fabric of this record that they are ultimately difficult to trace back to their respective sources for sure. The eight tracks collected here are so strong and individual that this ultimately rapidly becomes secondary. Whoever hides behind 10-20 is in possession of a powerful flair for complex organic electronic music and should be given all the attention they deserve.

4.6/5

10-20 (MySpace) | Highpoint Lowlife
Buy: iTunes