Gescom
Key Nell

"Key Nell" (Skam, 1996), besides being the most celebrated EP by the entity Gescom, is also the one where the Autechre touch is clearer than elsewhere, so much so that it was released, in the promo edition, under the name Autechre. In this EP, the award-winning duo Booth & Brown showcases both the hip hop influences typical of their late '90s work and the electro wanderings that appeared several times in this side project (which, we recall, involves them alongside other, more or less hidden, minds from the historic overseas label).

"Key Nell 1" is an immediate stroke of genius: through a synth emulating the sound and timbre of a jazz double bass, and electronic percussion that acts as the (counter)part of ride and cymbals, it opens up to a track that, as soon as the powerful beat enters, takes on a decidedly more inhuman dimension, with skewed and fractured counter-rhythms in the style of "LP5", while maintaining an underlying linearity - on the jazz parts - generating obsessive and engaging grooves; once the rhythm is constructed, cinematic strings and segmented vocals appear, embellishing a groove that is now more fluid and rounded, in a display of technique and ideas that greatly influenced Autechre during the 97/2005 period, which in my opinion remains their creative peak.

"Key Nell 2" and "Key Nell 3" maintain the same style, barely moving in a swamp of sharp and muddy sounds crossed by distant and alien melodic sections, with rarefied organic textures that take us back directly to the ever-cited "Amber" (its ghost is sighted time and again in Gescom's work), and more precisely to the legendary "Silverside", from which the typical fragmented and defragmented vocal samples are also borrowed, constructing mentalism and technicalities that, in mixing hip hop influences, industrial mechanisms, rhythmic experimentation, and ambient sounds, make this one-two an authentic manifesto of mid-nineties Autechre. "Key Nell 4", on the other hand, recalls "Chichi" (which later appeared on "Chiastic Slide"), and seems like a primordial version of it, presenting the same sounds, just as the atmosphere changes unexpectedly from playful and cheerful to nostalgic and disenchanted, a borderline personality that leaves to more arithmetically irregular fractals and thicker beats than ever the task of keeping the track steadily in a precise direction, that of rhythmic experimentation.

Perfectly balanced between melody, rhythm, and experimentation "Key Nell" is what one would call a perfect release.