VEX'D - Cloud Seed

A deserted street. Crumbling skyscrapers on either side, asphalt underfoot. A sun too distant, dim and waxen. From small fissures in the road surface rise isolated, distant beats. A post-apocalypse dancehall; a dub for nuclear winter. This is the scenario that opens “Cloud Seed”, the grand return of the duo Vex'd, aka the ones who ushered in the handover between late-millennium garage and Dubstep.

Five years after the corrosive, metropolitan drilling of “Degenerate”, the story has changed radically: forget the tellurian basslines, forget the caustic, violent synthetic vortexes. The future according to Vex'd is something desolate, abandoned, silent.

Beyond the cinematic suggestions this record evokes, it's important to stress one thing: how poorly the term Dubstep fits a work like this. And how the term Dubstep, understood as a musical genre - leaving aside the (substantial) slice of social and urban movement the word also represents - has by now become something old, outdated, obsolete.

In “Cloud Seed” we find something new, something “beyond”. In “Cloud Seed” there's room for Caribbean rhythms, apocalyptic sci-fi suggestions, avant-garde touches (the reworkings of compositions by John Richards and Gabriel Prokofiev), ambient textures, and something indefinable that I'd call post-’90s electronica (the ethno remix by Plaid).

Thanks to their remarkable visionary flair, Vex’d mark yet another step beyond the boundaries of contemporary electronic music. In a word, “Cloud Seed” is the future.

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30/05/2010