After four years away from Aperture, Oberman Knocks returns to the label! to drop his third LP. Trilate Shift is another LP of artistic post-techno from the producer. The tracks here often give off the impression of club tracks that have been put through a spin cycle and come out warped. While beats do occasionally rise to the surface, more often than not they find themselves dragged under by hissing synth textures and portentous swells of sub. It means that Trilate Shift is not a million miles away from Muslimgauze.
Ask not for whom the Oberman Knocks - he knocks for thee. The Mancunian electronic musician drops Trilate Shift, his third LP for Andrea Parker's Aperture (T.e.s.o., Broken Bone). This album picks up where the previous two left off, all hissing electronic faunae and Done-rattling digital distortion. Musiimgauze, Modeselektor and Prurient all spring to mind.
Oberman Knocks Is the alter ego of Sheffield producer Nigel Truswell who has recently found success as a documentary soundtrack composer.
His latest album, Trliate Shift, would make the perfect soundtrack to a movie about a high-tech futuristic world where human life has been replaced by robots.
There's very little human emotion — or warmth — on any of the tracks. Three of the album’s unique and interesting numbers — Ratched Cummian, Jarr-Copperr and Ex_con Phorma Lynes — sound less like songs and more like the ominous sounds made by the kind of nightmare machinery you'd encounter in a Philip K Dick screen adaptation. At times Trilate Shift is ominous and unnerving, but it’s addictive listening!
Nigel Truswell has a new double-LP release for aperture records, his first for the label since 2014. Trilate Shift is an austere, at times dense electronic recording that will wow lovers of non-dance-oriented electronic music. What it won't do, though, is appeal to a broad audience.
The disc's black and white cover is well-suited to this dramatically colourless new material. Oberman Knocks’ electronics are severe and bleak; nothing here gives comfort. Trilate Shift is a bed of cold, rusty nails — a very big, grandiose bed of nails. It's difficult not to be impressed by the scale of these 14 tracks: Your speakers will shudder, your ears will ring.
Trilate Shift is a soundtrack for the highest-res picture you've ever seen — an appropriate analogy given Truswell's recent success with film and installation work. He turned out a soundtrack for The Red Tree, an award-winning documentary last year, in 2016, he had an entry in the Week 53 festival produced by The Lowry in Salford, a group who commissioned his sound installation.
The detail throughout this double-LP is remarkable. There is almost never just one or two things going on, but because the production values are so high, every addition makes the work both more dynamic and less predictable. No question, Trilate Shift is a dark, somewhat foreboding release that will find few casual admirers. But for those with a taste for dystopian audio art, it's a great success.