FUNCTION - - Incubation

More than fifteen years have passed since Dave Sumner's alias Function came out into the open, following the rise of the Sandwell District project, which tied him closely to artists such as Female, Silent Servant and, of course, Regis, with whom he was already collaborating under the name Portion Reform.

Sumner's output, running since the second half of the '90s, has unfolded across a long string of high-calibre 12"s, yet it had never before crystallised into a conceptually cohesive album. This "Incubation" is the culmination and synthesis of a discourse with far-reaching roots, from a time when techno already carried within itself a body contaminated by post-industrial and ambient influences, before giving birth to a future of unsettling, post-apocalyptic shades, dominated by Orwellian dictatorships and inhuman mechanisms.

A culmination and linguistic analysis that emotionally interweaves with the recent work of Juan Mendez (who contributed the artwork here), of Ancient Methods and of Raime, while still holding on to a more classic, orthodox vision, no less evocative for it.

"Voiceprint" and "Against the Wall" are emblematic of a diseased sci-fi vision, claustrophobic like John Carpenter's "The Fog", poised between ambient abstraction and lysergic rhythms with a metallic edge. The New York artist presents himself as a deus ex machina controlling an entire universe: supernovae, meteorites, particles of antimatter and absurd orbital geometries shift and writhe at the edges of his compositions.

The Kraftwerk-like liftoff of "Counterpoint" raises the horizon to an elevated vantage point, in an ascesis of minimal electronics drawn into a gravity-less magnetic spiral. The fall of "Modifier" arrives almost unexpectedly and resumes digging into the pulsing flesh of a hybrid-synthetic body, in an aseptic, overwhelming rhythmic pulse: a destructive mathematical mechanism leads us to the sentient equation, the electric heart of the record, the title track.

Sumner's process of creation-destruction is at its peak here, as we see slow, ineluctable bassdrums gathering around a grand ritual of synthetic spatial elegy; a deep, universal breath has been completed, pulling us into a moment of distant ecstasy.

The following “Inter” and “Voiceprint” carry this journey forward, through deep-tech tunnels and tiny flickers of neural activity, before closing out inside the minimal-synth paranoia of “Psychic Wardfare”, a manifesto for a pathological dance with no way out except a full mental reformatting.

“Gradient I”, included only on the CD version (and also released on the “Gradient” 12″), carries on the ecstasy of a journey now trapped between looping basslines, hushed synths and traces of 808.

Perhaps not as forward-looking as the work of his aforementioned peers, Sumner nonetheless knows how to build a space that's cohesive and charged with strong, viral emotion. Adept at pushing into the lowest impulses of the cerebral cortex, he taps into the nerves of a dark science-fiction narrative, feeding on pathological dystopias and vast stellar spaces. A work to be listened to repeatedly in order to grasp its subtle nuances and the architecture of a sound precariously balanced between mechanical and biological life.

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05/03/2013