The abundance of adjectives such as “sadistic”, “inhuman” and “uncomfortable” tell you that Nigel Truswell’s latest is not easy listening. However it’s also described as “compelling” and “intriguing”
Oberman Knocks ticks off a wishlist of Plaid, Quinoline Yellow, and Uexkull and Adapta (both former halves of Bitstream) to reinterpret the angular complexities of his Beatcroff Slabs album for Andrea Parker's Aperture imprint. Plaid temper Degonnt Type Runners to a swaggering triplet template layered with lucid, spacious harmonics yielding a signature 2nd half flourish of intricate melody, while Bitstream’s Dave Connor debuts his Uexkull with a slow, inwardly folding Techno remix of Lenkmyte full of the quirks and electronic sorcery he's known and loved for. Turn her over and Quinoline Yellow turns the convulsing mechanics of Pneuquonsis On Return inside out with a hollowed, detailed inversion, for former Bitstreamer Steve Connor to drop the boot-rumbling bass and whirring electro swerve of a Fewton Tension Kords remix.
With coded titles posing as medieval torture implements, Nigel Truswell is found held down and straining at the shock therapy manacles making him relive a tumultuous flashback sequence, as Oberman Knocks intriguing methods of imprisoning, gouging and deprogramming dubstep/techno/sadistic chillout achieve a compellingly ugly writhe through walls of surround sound. Barring Konshun Four attempting a trudge to safety, it’s a freeform instrumentalism with the laser-guided action of a masked slasher, regressing to the itchy click-clacks of a monstrous centipede owning dank hallways (Tek-Fir Blades), and undercut by closed-circuit glitching. Even if more delicate ears find it laborious, it should get him a film credit somewhere at the very least.
7/10
Hewed from granite, the London-based producer and concrete sound sculptor, Nigel Truswell, wields monolithic scrapes and dragged Industrial-sized chains together, through palatial landscapes. Ominous and looming the Beatcroff Slabs shift around, what can only be described as, a haunting engineered world: a psychogeographic soundtrack to the chambers and depths of H R Giger’s renderings.
Even the cryptically misplaced and reticent track-titles allude to some esoteric or machine-coded form of communication: appellation’s such as Jamcole Partition and Gonn Blass Locker hardly give anything away. If there is any kind of theme then it's an alien one; Truswell’s foreboding ambient contractions hinting at some unearthly presence.
Most of this 16-track oeuvre travails through organically sounding effects whilst distant colossus-heavy footsteps permeate across the minimalistic composed wastes. The first actual beats don't enter the fray until the fourth track, Konshun Four, and when they do, those monotonous vistas are swept aside to make room for awkward tumbling breaks.
Another addition to the leaden ‘Science-Friction’ tone is Truswell’s mysterious voice which hangs suspended in the static fog like an apparition, or repeats obscured utterances like a broken-up signal from some distant dimension.
Often creepy and murky, the abstract horizons drift between exalted reverence (Jawbin Breaks) and lumbering dread (Lenkmyte). For those who enjoy their electronica darker and moodier, Oberman Knocks orbits the same space as the Warp and Ghostly International labels.
Beatcroff Slabs follows Knocks’ first release on the Aperture label, the widely acclaimed 2009 debut album 13th Smallest, and is comprised of 16 tracks that take his sounds down yet darker, more twisted corridors and into ever expanding sonic spaces. Beatcroff Slabs’ evolving sound has essentially been built around the same core elements as 13th Smallest — those of manipulated synthesised studio sounds, fused with field recordings of the everyday and Knocks’ travels. *The vocals, both snatched in public and his own, are contorted into instrumentation, and conversely synthetic sounds mutated into those with a vocal resonance — human and beyond. The album is produced with the same rudimentary set-up and continues Knocks unabated and unique trajectory in sound. *With Beatcroff Slabs, Oberman Knocks (Nigel Truswell) has produced a visceral album which further explores his trademark themes — densely claustrophobic cinematic pieces, as with the opening track Ak-himp Rise, the use of arhythmic beats such as in Leckren Verso and his love for bottom heavy sonics, found in Konshun Four.
People speak scornfully of ‘dance music you can’t dance to’, but sometimes you suspect they just haven't tried.
Venerable Mancunian software wizards Autechre get that jibe consistently, despite their clear electro and techno leanings. Well, here’s the second album by Nigel Trusweill as Oberman Knocks – he proudly proclaims his Autechre influence, but you really can’t dance to his gloopy, acidic assemblies of inhuman creaks and thuds. It resembles lots of canonical electronic music – just maliciously rewired and dragged through a hedge backwards. Useful as an instant horror soundtrack, or an insight into what the recent Actress album would sound like to your grandparents.
Oh, this one’s a bit spooky. Oberman Knocks is busting out some sinister electronic business with a bit of a dark ambient/dub techno bent to it. Spacious, creaking loops and swirling industrial drones combine to make a spacious, skittish computer-age nightmare of soundtracky malevolence. It sounds like a dystopian future where we all have to live in tunnels underground, kind of like Waterworld but, you know, with tunnels instead of water. I’m a little bit scared. I think I’m going to have to turn it off actually, it’s making me feel really on edge. I suppose that’s how it’s supposed to make you feel so job well done, now get it away from me!
The grit and grime reach alarming levels on Oberman Knocks second album Beatcroff Slabs. Little poignant fun, like that on the debut which became one of my favourites of 2009, is to be had. The industrial sinisterness on Beatcroff Slabs suck you down into a whirlpool with its glowing electronica menace and sense of suspense.
The beauty of the beast then only first comes to surface with the wacky waltz of Degonnt Type Runners. The first half of the CD is a brainwashing experience – burn all your Warp Records for instance. The album's better half brings in space invader sound effects like Salsa, which is desperately needed with this wryly humoured electronica dish.
Inspired perhaps by David Lynch's Eraserhead this album celebrates grey matter. The latter sounds of Beatcroff Slabs draw life into the deepest realms of the electronica dimension. Meant to twist one's ears from the onset, the CD version has too many different stages of affrontry and since I have not heard the LP (yet), I remain in doubt.
That is usually a good sign though. I mistrust music that sounds attractive immediately. Oberman Knocks certainly maintains his attitude and stance but after weeks I still have not made up my mind. The flimsy, yet Spartan start and the rather soft final touches may melt in fine style on the abridged LP of Beatcroff Slabs. The 16-track CD offers too much, but who's complaining when you can select tracks on a CD?
Also from the capital, electronica producer Oberman Knocks comes from the same school of awkward track titles (Ak-himp Rise, Pneuquonsis On Return) as the better-known Autechre. The horror movie ambience and uncomfortable, irregular rhythms of Beatcroft Slabs has the same ravaged appeal as their recent work too. A remix album, Beatcroft Splinters, makes it a little groovier but it’s still way out there.
With a whistling uneasy calm, Beatcroff Slabs ends as it begins. Between these two points Oberman Knocks serves up a thick crunching confusion of 37th Century virus-funk. Oberman Knocks assails the listener with deep subterranean rumbles, whiplash almost-rhythms and the faltering ghosts of beats. While reminiscent of the late 90s Warp of Aphex Twin and Autechre, it also sits well with the current dark-ambient brood, particularly Demdike Stare. They both share a similarly fogged inscrutability, except Oberman Knocks is mainly concerned with micro-events, fizzing and colliding in ever Increasing complexity. Many of the sounds are sourced from field recordings that have been mangled beyond recognition.
There is a melted logic to much of Beatcroff Slabs. Mutant techno strains and loping hip-hop traces can be detected beneath the sound of tortured circuitry. The alien machine intelligence of these tracks is reflected in their titles. Fewton Tension Chords, Ketra Ripp, and Gonn Blass Locker discourage interpretation and ask that you take the music purely as sound files, dispatched from some mad Hal 9000 like mind.
Equal parts forbidding and enticingly beautiful, Beatcroff Slabs is the sound of the tangled industrial guts of a vast confused machine, stumbling through an unfamiliar jagged landscape, completely perplexed as to now it got there.
If Ridley Scott hasn’t assigned Blade Runner 2’s soundtrack to anyone yet, then Nigel Truswell’s
your man...
With music like this there’s a greater focus on the production, and to the artists, it’s an art, every minor link amongst the chain is incredibly important, none more so than the others.
Drawing only those interested in electronic and industrial music, Oberman Knocks is self-indulgent music of which critics will hail is individualistic alongside other artists most famous within the same genre. Nigel Truswell’s eye is not just thinking about the final cut, but infact every cut that comes before it.
These 16 tracks to an uneducated ear will appear indistinguishable, as there’s hardly a moment on Beatcroff Slabs that gives us a melody that’s on-beat. Oberman knocks creates music that would sound more comfortable as a film soundtrack. With Jamcole Partition sounding like the inside of a time warp, there’s an additional unsettling feeling about the track, as the reverberations of what sounds like machinery allow your mind to wonder as to what it could be operating. Whilst Ketra Ripp is more sinister, there’s a freakishly alienistic core running through the entirety of Beatcroff Slabs.
This isn’t music you listen to driving in your car, neither is it music you would expect to blast out before a big night out on the town, just when and where you would listen to Oberman knocks is a difficult one to place.
Oberman Knocks is Truswell’s creation and one that he himself will probably always love more than anyone else.
7/10
Every tone, every beat, is richly textured.
Sometimes a record tells you whether you're going to like it before you've even hit play. With electronica this goes double: track titles like Scanlon’s Heaping Gore Pull, Pneuquonsis on Return and Fewton Tension Chords are either going to intrigue a potential listener, or make you think “stop playing silly buggers“. If the former, then this collection is for you: if the latter, then there's not one nanosecond in the of grinding, bending, warping electronic sounds that is going to make you think otherwise.
Though there is some repetition to these grooves, there is nothing that resembles dance music as such. Rather, these are sounds pulled this way and that, thumped against one another, stretched out to reveal their fine details, and turned inside out purely for the sake of it. You may hear moments that sound like references to science fiction soundtracks, to the industrial music of the 1980s, to electroacoustic experimentation, even (as on Jamcole Partition) to what sounds like Phil Collins – but these are always fleeting: this isn't modernist experimentation or postmodernist pastiche, it's just a set of sounds for is own sake.
There is plenty of sophistication, though. Every tone, every beat, is richly textured, even if those textures are uncomfortable to apprehend. The rhythms, inhuman and pseudo-random though they may be, are intriguing. It's like machine glossolalia, a resemblance of meaning that drags you in and endlessly frustrates. But you knew that, right? You've read this far, the track titles didn’t put you off, so however ugly Beatcroff Slabs is, you may very well enjoy it.
Oberman Knocks is the project of London-based musician Nigel Truswell. Although he relocated to London in the late eighties, Truswell’s work as Oberman Knocks owes much to the rich musical heritage of his birthplace, Sheffield, home of Cabaret Voltaire, Human League, Heaven 17, ABC to Pulp, Warp or The Black Dog, who still operate from there today, to name but a few. Following a chance encounter with Andrea Parker via Mira Calix’s Chantal Passamonte, Truswell released his debut album, 13th Smallest, on Parker's burgeoning new imprint, Aperture, three years ago. Dark, intricate and post industrial, the album was an incredibly intense journey through dystopian landscapes.
Three years on, the intensity has increased drastically. Beatcroff Slabs shares much of the rugged, desolate landscapes with its predecessor, but whilst 13th Smallest collected tracks recorded over a long period of time, Beatcroff Slabs was worked on as a standalone piece, and this certainly shows in the magnitude of its compositions. Oberman Knocks exists somewhere between the highly toxic post industrial electronic landscapes of Pan Sonic and the much sleeker ambiences of Autechre, but Truswell’s vision ensures his work is utterly unique. He never feels more at ease than when he deals with fractured rhythms and angular corrosive soundscapes, assembling layer after layer of crushing noises and sounds into anarchic mechanical structures.
Amidst the chaos, Truswell manages to preserve a strong melodic element to his compositions by nurturing tiny loops and patterns and allowing them to grow and prosper until they become integrant part of his pieces. Perhaps the most striking aspect of this record however is the way Truswell offsets the extreme mechanical appearance of his music by using human voices pretty much throughout. Highly processed, at times distressed into chilling scream-like fragments, at others assembled into ephemeral chants, and used like any other components in the music, the vocal elements act as reminders that as much as the machines are key to the work, it's ultimately Truswell who directs them.
It's almost impossible not to draw a parallel with Burial, whose extensive use of ghostly processed vocals sits within his music in a very similar way to here, but once again, Truswell’s approach is entirely different. Instead of coagulating into ethereal songs, the voice samples are like punctuating calls and signals, as if Truswell had somehow captured bribes of conversations amidst the clanks and clatter of the machines, and was trying to reposition them exactly where he had found them. The result is the same though; by using heavily processed vocal components, Truswell, like Burial, highlights the intensely emotional nature of his music.
Although extremely corrosive and abstract, Truswell’s compositions are as far removed from decay and destruction as can be. These are fully functioning structures which, although appearing totally alien, and extremely complex, perform their tasks extremely successfully throughout. It is rare these days to find a truly Individual artist, especially in the field of electronic music, but truly individual Truswell is. Oberman Knocks, like Autechre, Pan Sonic or Burial, occupies a unique space, away of external influences. With Beatcroff Slabs, Nigel Truswell consolidates the foundations laid with his debut album and confidently moves ahead without looking back.
A collection of remixes by artists as diverse as Plaid, Quinoline Yellow, Michna and Kero is due out on 12” and digital download is due out later on in the year.
The growth of user-friendly technology may have had some negative effects in terms of electronica’s sonic heterogeneity. Imaginative producers, however, will always find a way to sound distinctive: for Oberman Knocks, aka Nigel Trusweill, the answer lies in deliberately limiting his palette of synthesised sounds and relying heavily on field recordings, including vocal samples. These elements are entwined, with endless subtle vacations, within labyrinthine combinations of stuttering beats and ambient synth washes.
Truswell’s unrelenting adherence to this approach over sixteen tracks makes Beatcroff Slabs a forbidding listen. Its combination of metallic, Autechre-esque rhythms and snatched, contorted vocal samples gives the record a claustrophobic, nightmarish edge, with the same sense of shadowy, vague distress that lurks in the depths of Aphex Twin’s early ambient work. What the record lacks in diversity or narrative development, then, it compensates for in the clarity of its vision, testifying to the imaginative potency of Trusweill's narrow-focus approach.
Oberman Knocks were the first band to be released by Andrea Parker's ultra-hip aperture label back in 2009; 2012 sees them returning to the fold with a new full-length album. Released in tandem with the album, Beatcroff Splinters features remixes and reworkings of that album's highlights. Warp legends Plaid break down Degonnt Type Runners into a clanking, stuttering slice of dark, minimal electro which sits half-way between hip-hop and house.
Ex-Bitstreaam member Uexkel!l evokes Selected Ambient Works-era Aphex on his re-rub of Lenkmyte, while fellow Bitstream-er Adapta takes the template laid down in early Squarepusher — super-fast 303 squelches and effects-heavy distortion — and transmutes it into a Liars-esque slice of vocal ambient electro. Ghostly International's Michna hacks Cozermas into stripped, lo-fi gime drums and reverbdrenched synth stabs, while Oberman Knocks' own remix of Konshun Four manages to meld heavily-distorted hip-hop kicks with distant, echoing Vangelis synth-stings and shimmening, half-heard vocals. It's a solid, inventive release, and a welcome retum from one of aperture's most interesting producers.
This album, on the other hand, while doing more or less the same thing with doomy artificial environments, irregular high-tech percussion and liquid metal as
Exo, is a bona fide sonic adventure rather than just a commentary on cultural excess. Nigel Truswell’s milieu is the modernist-minded British electronica of the late 1990s — Autechre, Mira Calix and Luke Vibert. His second album Beatcroff Slabs
is a visceral and thrilling journey through a series of rich musical scenarios, each a sensual experience that defies all but the crudest possible allusions: factories, cellars, the secret life of technology, the machinations of higher beings, perhaps. But it doesn't t really need any explanations from outside of itself.