album // Displaced Links
This CD was released as part of a Mute series curated by producer, engineer and master sound designer Paul Kendall, also known as PK and Piquet. PK was a familiar credit on many Mute releases, and at least as responsible as Flood for creating that unique 'industrial' electronic style through his work with Nitzer Ebb, Parallax and countless others. He also mixed tracks for non-Mute act Nerve, whose album Cancer Of Choice was a gritty slab of early digital rock, as well as working with Nine Inch Nails. This was the fourth, and final disc in the Parallel Series, and saw Kendall collaborating with Simon Fisher Turner, equally renowned for his approach to sound design. The outcome is an interesting interplay of tapes, harsh electronic sounds and processed noises, perhaps best displayed by the layered tape sprawl of 'Shift'.
Displaced Links should not be heard without first listening to Shwarma, the 1996 album from Fisher Turner, and his first under the alias SFT. Recorded at Mute's Worldwide Studios, after its recording Fisher Turner provided Kendall with a DAT of 'source material'. According to Kendall's liner notes, he then took these snippets and created a full album via digital manipulation and extensive use of ProTools. These days, collaborations of this sort are de rigeur (a regular read of The Wire review pages confirms this), but in 1997 this level of duo non-interaction was unheard of. It does, however, leave you wondering whose album this now is, Kendall's or Fisher Turner's (or even Wire's Bruce Gilbert, who supplied 'frequency loops' to the source album).
'Mechanism' is a strong example of the process in action. The piece sounds like a crunched-up version of Wire's 1980s signature piece 'Drill', with sequences and tones replacing that track's maelstrom of guitars. It's chugging rhythm and swirling static washes are only tempered by some occasional high-end and almost pleasant synths. Elsewhere, the duo deploy loops and oscillating drones to create shimmering, almost relaxing tracks; a kind of harsh industrial ambience in the vein of Andrew Mackenzie's Hafler Trio. 'Pedal Stop' is a good example - sheets of heavy noise smother the track, while smaller reverbrating sonic events are woven into the mix. 'Sump', on the other hand, sounds like a particularly unpleasant machine, with a central motif that sounds like a processed print head in your average PC inkjet. 'Beached Driver' is one of the most accessible tracks, featuring a sampled telephone conversation snippet, some phased keyboards and an almost conventional beat - if Simon Fisher Turner ever provided the music to a Russian sci-fi thriller, I could imagine it sounding like this.
I was heavily into 'ambient' music during its popularity in the 1990s, but never got into the whole serene, hippy 'relaxational' style; I preferred my less frantic music to have a bit of grit, a bit of an edge. This has those elements in abundance. At times this disc has an almost beautiful, tone (listen to the rising alien synth swirls of 'Cylinder'), at others the same devilish harshness that informed the likes of Throbbing Gristle and early Cabaret Voltaire (the distorted noises and sqeaky rhythms in the second section of 'Cylinder'). It's clever and captivating without being inaccessible, and some of the strange, broken noises used to create rhythms actually pre-date the modern reductionism and glitsch-iness of today's electronica.