Arecibo Message
For better or worse, the jump between Burial’s self-titled debut and Untrue, a year and a half later, was an upgrade from sounds to songs. Most of the tracks built around post-RZA soul samples rinsed with enough effects to make them sound shouted from the bottom of an empty well. Naturally, the internet went apeshit. But Untrue also had the massive potential to pigeonhole dubstep at the exact moment of its crossover. Songs like “Archangel” and “Ghost Hardware” possessed enough pop-structure to be, at once, broadly appealing and slightly reductive. Of course, that’s usually how these things go down.
On “Sidetrak,” the opening shot on Boxcutter’s Arecibo Message, the producer from Northern Ireland sublimates Burial’s hip-hop-rooted tricks into a song that eventually explodes into a frenzy of live drumming. At that moment, “Sidetrak” is dubstep, but is not necessarily of dubstep. That virtuosic first track is a fitting beginning to Boxcutter’s third album, which draws from elements of house music, acid jazz, jungle, trance, breakbeat and even pop without ever tipping over into anything other than a pure dubstep album. The burgeoning genre had such a dynamic year in 2009 largely because it proved capable of shouldering enormous expansion—incorporating disparate genres while simultaneously creating a stronger definition of itself. Arecibo Message feels like an attempt to push dubstep (or Boxcutter himself) in a good number of different directions, but never once does Boxcutter lose sight of what he loves about the genre.
Pitchfork’s Jess Harvell off-handedly knocked Arecibo Message for being “a experiment [sic] in bleeding one rave era into another,” but that’s largely what makes it awesome. Boxcutter sees himself as a direct link in the lineage of electronic dance music, and he sees dubstep as its future. The song titles nod toward the styles he draws from—“Free House Acid,” “Lamp Post Funk,” “S p a c e b a s s”—but when accelerated house music pops up in “Mya Rave v2,” it sounds unlike anything from another era.
The actual Arecibo message was an attempt to make contact with extraterrestrial life forms 25,000 years in the future, by beaming a series of binary codes into space. As a theme for a dubstep album, that’s about as genius as it gets, and it bleeds over into the way Boxcutter thinks of himself as a producer, and even the cover art. His first album, Oneric, featured a tree with flowers in bloom on the cover. Arecibo Message features a drawing of futuristic fauna spawned from a spacebound, glowing white orb. There’s no better symbol for Boxcutter’s music being rooted in dubstep’s universe without being tethered by it.
-Martin Brown, 2009
Comments