Radiant Remains: Deconstructing the club with Egyptrixx
Canada's David Psutka discusses his new album and his desire to reformulate the raw elements of club music
In downtown Toronto stands the Robarts Library, a concrete monolith supposedly modelled on the form of a peacock, and an uncompromised testament to Brutalism’s raw material vision. Imaginative critics might compare it to Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, while others might stick with the somewhat tawdry ‘Fort Book.’ Love it or hate it, it’s an intimidating presence in the Canadian capital, where winter temperatures rarely venture above freezing. Its sharp angles, triangular geometrics and sprawling network of skywalks and towers look to have erupted from the ground, planted beneath some million years before by some civically minded Arthur C. Clarke creation – a primitive vision of the future that provokes immediate discord amid its surroundings.
As such, it’s an entirely fitting location for the Toronto-based Egyptrixx to get in touch with us to discuss his new record, Transfer of Energy [Feelings of Power], soon due for release on his own newly formed Halocline Trance label. “Can’t tell if it’s intentional, but the heating system is generating a soft whir of pink noise,” he writes via email. “Feeling pretty institutional and simultaneously chill in here.”
The foundation of Halocline Trance sees Egyptrixx, real name David Psutka, move away from the London-based Night Slugs, with whom he has spent the last few years establishing a sound that’s ventured progressively deeper into the murky architectures of grime and techno. Tracks from his Bible Eyes record, as well an offering on the label’s first All Stars compilation, were rhythmically speaking a neat fit alongside the likes of labelmates Bok Bok, Girl Unit and Helix.
But how can someone over three and a half thousand miles away work with a label tied to such a London sound? This, it turns out, presented little challenge. “I felt the essence of the label was in its conceptual spirit and aesthetic consistency,” Psutka tells us, “textural, abstract, hybridised and playful. It seemed completely appropriate to release a song like A.C.R.R on Night Slugs, a song which really has nothing to do with London club music.
“There are a lot of things I really love about grime, and a few of the ideas probably ended up on the record, but that’s as far as it goes. I wouldn’t really say I was explicitly referencing or exploring grime. Minimalism and deconstructionism are the central devices to my writing, so yeah, I think some of the tracks accidentally overlap sometimes, but I'm not too interested in referencing genres.”
It’s a response that upends several assumptions about where inspiration comes from, particularly for club music, which is so often dependent on specific conditions. “I do kinda get the sense that the music comes from a specific, tangible place,” he continues. “The Egyptrixx project is about laying bare the elements of club music; celebrating them in isolation. I’m trying to separate and repurpose these because I think they’re powerful, even transcendent. The sounds, emotions, rhythms and junctures…”
A/B til Infinity, Psutka’s 2013 offering, began to hint at these bare elements, and it’s no surprise to hear him describe Transfer of Energy as a sequel, with sound palettes and demos being carried over. With the creation of Halocline Trance however, Psutka has given himself space to go much deeper, and in doing so create something harsh, jarring and occasionally beautiful. Psutka is keen to downplay any notion of a departure however, despite Transfer’s dense and often beatless offerings operating on a whole new level of intensity to previous releases. “I'm not so into this idea of making bold or splashy directional statements with records as an objective,” he suggests. “There's no reinvention or anything like that – just different articulations of the same basic concept.”
“I’ve always felt that the best club music toggles between feelings of concussion and tranquillity, and I try to place my songs on this same spectrum. Occasionally I find they feel like the same thing. It’s visceral, frequency music.”
The lush, technicolor drone of opening track and label namesake Halocline Trance, itself reminiscent of Eleh’s Radient Intervals, gives way to raw, mangled waveforms that, despite Psutka’s misgivings, ring out like wails from modern grime’s expanded palette. Together they attempt to build something bigger, before purposely falling apart over the metallic, reverb drenched scrape of a hi-hat. You can hear clearly what Psutka means when he talks of elements in isolation, with each synth line and sample occupying a separate room in the same burnt out factory.
“I’m always kinda obsessing about grandiose architecture – power plants and infrastructure, shit like that.” It’s an obsession that shines through in that each track on the record seems to follow through on a very particular, mechanical blueprint, the logical product of thoughtful construction. “I have a particular set of rules or parameters for each project, and I stick pretty closely to these, so there isn’t much indecision when I write. I like it this way. It’s fluid, positive, fun.”
Transfers of Energy joins a collection of releases seen over the last few years that, whilst hardly suitable for the floor, are certainly addressing the club. Last year saw the release of Australian composer Ben Frost’s A U R O R A, which offers listeners a glimpse into a world where “emergency flares illuminate ruined nightclubs and the faith of the dancefloor rests in a diesel-powered generator spewing forth its own extinction, eating rancid fuel so loudly it threatens to overrun the very music it is powering.” We witness similar destruction on Room 40 labelmate Lawrence English’s Wilderness of Mirrors. Meanwhile, Leyland Kirby’s The Death of a Rave got a reissue, which if you haven’t heard, sounds a lot like what The Shining might have sounded like if, instead of ballroom music, Kubrik had used late 80s rave and UK hardcore.
Even closer to the floor, you’ve got guys like Mumdance, who last year – when not putting out distilled eskibeat with the likes of Novelist – was developing his ‘weightless’ sound with Logos, the subject of an excellent mix for Dazed.
So what’s with all this reflexivity? When did we get so romantic about our clubbing experiences? Transfers seems to be contending with the type of emotions that intense situations in the club can burn into you – to be remembered, perhaps forever, but never quite experienced again in the same way. As Psutka puts it, “these are concrete and euphoric slabs of sound.”
Setting Transfers apart, however, from the ambient tendencies of similar explorations is a jarring sense of discord throughout. The record never once arrives at a place that might be described as comfortable – never is the listener permitted to languish. Industrial soundbites emerge from below to disrupt wavering drones. Metallic shards tear open warm washes of synth. Tracks like Mirror Etched on Shards of Amethyst, which manage to combine all the noise of Psutka’s machinery with Ruff Sqwad era heartbreak, fall silent without warning, letting the floor fall out from under the listener. Title track Transfer of Energy bristles with cold, soulless industrial menace, a grotesque patchwork of grime tropes and drum patterns refusing to align.
It’s a lot, and the urge to probe the Pandora’s Box of influences behind it proves too strong in this case. “I was listening to a lot of early power-industrial records,” says Psutka, listing acts like Ramleh, Anenzephalia, and the notorious gasmask-clad Genocide Organ, whose ironic, nihilistic, or possibly even sincere use of fascist, racist themes and imagery is the subject of many a belligerent forum thread. In spite of his earlier insistence on an aversion to making statements, name-dropping a group as extreme in approach as Genocide Organ is definitely saying something, identifying with a sound-aesthetic that most people would respond to strongly – whether that response be disgust, bewilderment, or in some way thrilling. You get the impression that Psutka has concerned himself with limiting an apathetic reception.
“Donald Judd's Specific Objects manifesto was definitely a big inspiration too,” he adds. “Ideas about understanding the intrinsic framing of your medium and technical ability were important to this record.”
Like A/B til Infinity, tracks on Transfers of Energy will be accompanied by graphic and video design from the Berlin-based artist Andreas Nicola Fischer. ANF’s video work, in which elements seem to slip in and out of stable, solid forms at will, assist Psutka in lending priority to the weight and texture of his sounds – an exciting prospect for what’s already a dense, challenging and provocative listen.