BLAWAN - SickElixir

For over fifteen years Jamie Roberts has been moving through the underground of British techno. Starting out from a childhood spent breeding insects, he's built himself from scratch into a recognisable figure in the more abrasive corners of club music; whether with the Karenn project alongside Pariah or in his solo career, Blawan has established himself as one of the few artists able to make industrial techno physically unbearable without ever losing the thread: heir to Regis and Surgeon, but with an identity that no longer needs reference points.
Released on XL, the album is a suffocating work in which cybernetic noises graft themselves onto wonky rhythms, genuine seismic shocks capable of making headphones and sound systems wince, underpinned by a mastery of sound design that has few rivals. Unintelligible voices, corroded by a post-human society, intertwine with martial fractures; the mantra takes on a mechanical, futuristic shape, layered over UK bass legacies warped by overdrive. It gets straight to the point, and does so in short bursts, two or four minutes at a time. The formulas, however, tend to blur into one another.

The low frequencies emerge like distorted monoliths, almost organic in their vibration, set against a controlled yet stifling noise. This stubborn characterisation defines its idiom but also its limit. Blawan's language is broadly recognisable, a sort of alliance between Death Grips and Arca filtered through a techno-bionic sensibility that perhaps leans too heavily on sound alone. The metallic, syncopated dub-swing of "Don't Worry We Happy" is arguably the record's centre of gravity, and the second half largely convinces; and yet the feeling lingers that, beneath the punishing architectures, what remains is a proto-manifesto still waiting to detonate.

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22/01/2026