SHACKLETON - Three EPs

Shackleton is back. Shackleton is back with a monolith titled "Three EPs", released for the young guns at Perlon, the Frankfurt label now based in Berlin that specializes in giving space to complete madmen like Nikolai, Narcotic Syntax and even that bearded fellow Villalobos. This matters for a series of made-up reasons: whether it's because Shack himself has moved from London to Berlin, or because he surely has a quality dealer supplying him with precious goodness, our man has waded through the post-Skull Disco shallows, reinforcing the formula that made him known.

If in his earlier records the adrenaline-fuelled, metropolitan anxiety felt unresolved, locked between ethnic swirls and crushing silences, with "Three EPs" the man lets himself fall into the void of an uncompromising despair, digging into dub and cyclical pulsation, into the vocal samples of a Burial on methadone.

Sammy pushes his dub visionary streak even further, parting ways – as if any further signal were needed – definitively from the London-sound of a dubstep that has by now fully settled into guidelines allowing anyone to stereotype it. So no wah wah basses, no know jah, and no flirting with hardcore. Without his partner-in-crime Appleblim, Shackleton has become an even sharper producer.

The result is enough to drive you mad and call for a hearing aid, caught between drones in mystical crisis via pitch bending and the darkest of dilations, effectively becoming the spearhead of electronic dub avant-garde, or future dub, or whatever you want to call the thing that pours out of the speaker cones as “(No More) Negative Thoughs“, which, to be precise, is the link between Berlin dub, some random country in the Middle East and a subwoofer with its gain cranked to +11, in a cynical descent toward the supposed elimination of negative thoughts that is actually a blend of paranoia and perpetual apocalyptic atmospheres.

This is what Shackleton has become: a standard-bearer of paranoia poured into a dubstep that has never been so isolationist and dark, an extremist of the Bristol sound and of the hallucinations of a possible darkness at the end of the light foreseen by Tricky and Massive Attack, which reaches its sublimation in “Asha In The Tabernacle”, with a mystical mantra repeated and reverberated for three minutes amid murky basses measured out with a caliper before the kick and percussion kick in.

“Three EPs” steps outside the author's own established territory and writes a story apart from that of every other contemporary dub producer; the absence of references to the Jamaican world, to jungle, or to the Berlin scene in the strict sense puts it in a position of prestige, seducing through the disasters it depicts, including in the closing “Something Has Got To Give”, leaving the clear sense that Shackleton not only can do whatever he wants, but manages to pull it off completely.

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14/10/2009