MILANESE - Adapt

"Adapt" is a mini-LP or maxi-EP, call it whatever you like, on which Milanese hands over the jewels of "Extended" to some sonic terrorist friends, probably enclosing a letter recommending they chop some proper wood. Said and done. Hrdvision, Clark, Distance and a mysterious Venger throw themselves at the material entrusted to them.

Distance, after his excellent album (also on the blessed Planet Mu), here tackles one of the most interesting tracks on "Extended": Dead Man Walking, in collaboration with Virus Syndicate. What was grime in its rawest, most visionary form here slows down, wriggles free of its harsh edges to distill itself into a paranoid dubstep, with the Manchester crew's vocals, left practically untouched, resting on autopilot over ragga basslines.

Hrdvision, Clark and Venger do exactly what the gospel according to the sub-woofer commands: destroy and destroy some more. Farewell melody, farewell choruses - as the Minutemen put it talking about hardcore, you don't need a damn thing. You just need to get the drum machine pumping. So it happens that Sight Beyond Sight, Mr. Bad News and Billy Electron veer off at a tangent, leaving nothing of the originals but a blended break of thick basses and sharp, dry rhythms. Taking the long way round, you could cite Aphex Twin to feel a bit more highbrow, but in truth this is territory closer to Renegade Hardware, with the grindcore of Counterstrike, Evol Intent and Spor. Thoroughly healthy, thoroughly unrestrained nihilism.

There's also room for two unreleased tracks, or rather, one and a half. "So Malleable", featured on "1 Up", the British producer's first EP for Warp, appears here in a cold mix that shifts its coordinates entirely. For the first half, the impression is of hearing a less stoned, more vicious Kode9; once the track flips at the halfway mark, Milanese's rhythmic know-how surfaces instead, a bridge - no longer just notional but concrete - between classic dubstep and breakbeat, aiming to shake off that shadow of trip-hop 2.0 that sometimes haunts the London sound. The genuinely unreleased track is "Double Face", and perhaps it wasn't so necessary. Steve Milanese is most likely not all that suited to handling melodies more relaxed and gentle than those he usually deals in, so Kate Kestrel's virginal voice proves hard to reconcile with his angularity, coming across as a sort of less pimp-ish Vikter Duplaix.

It's the centrifuge of some of the standout songs from a standout album like "Extended": you couldn't reasonably expect more, and certainly what's come out isn't some combed-and-polished product aimed at crossing over into circles outside grime. It's an adaptation, as the title suggests, and as such it does its dirty work.

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11/09/2007