Shackleton
Fabric 55: Shackleton

There are records in some artists' careers that mark a point of no return, a threshold that, once crossed, will inevitably denote a before and an after. Sam Shackleton, a brilliant explorer of sounds, fresh from his years of stunning releases for the Skull Disco label and the spectacular album "Three EP's," will mark his personal point of no return in 2010 with this DJ set for the prestigious Fabric DJ mix series in London. In the subsequent years, his music will change; his deadly and tribal dubstep will increasingly cloak itself in rarefied, subdued ambient atmospheres, less focused on groove, too distant from these early, glorious years. A calvary, a sacrificial ritual, an exhausting massacre dripping with blood, this is Fabric 55, each track flows into another in an unstoppable maelstrom. The DJ set features both unreleased tracks and reworked and exclusive versions of previously edited tracks, all signed by Shackleton. Right from the spectacular opening pair "Come up" and "Moon over Joseph burial," the radiated atmosphere is leaden, skeletal, and emaciated, the decomposing body of dubstep resurrected by devastating rhythmic blasts and grooves. Thus, dances, but dances of death, deviant shamanic rites, bloodied scalps hanging from lances, the smell of burning. Shackleton handles the sonic material with absolute mastery and a sense of drama, a maelstrom of synthetic percussion intoxicates the senses, incessant, pounding, and alienating, the basslines are deep, dark, and bottomless abysses, twisting upon themselves pierced by hypnotic synthetic tribalism, the icy gusts of very minimalist electronics characterize every passage of the record, the voices emerging from the sonic fabric hover like ghosts over the excruciating rhythmic ritual. Shackleton's electronics intrinsically possess something profoundly human, physical, and primitivist, devoid of abstractions, one of the most brilliant and original minds in electronic music of the 2000s, Fabric 55 represents his point of no return, his totem, and at the end of its over 70 intense minutes, one is left there, with the feeling of having truly listened to something unrepeatable.