New Brutalism Rainer Veil

Released almost exactly a year on from their debut ‘Struck’ EP, Liam Morley and Dan Valentine return with ‘New Brutalism’, an exploration of angular, brittle club music. Referencing the stripped-down, utilitarian aesthetic of Brutalist architecture (a detail of Preston bus station features on the cover), the 5 tracks here mine looped, blocky source material gradually embellished with more complex percussive and atmospheric layers that are at once robust and introspective. From the opening woodblock/rave dismantling “UK WIll Not Survive” to the heady Hardcore of “Three Day Jag”, the EP evokes a distinctly Northern British Weltanschauung, a joyous revelling in melancholy that goes as far back as the earliest dances documented in Mark Leckey’s ‘Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore’ - somehow unique to British nightlife. The EP closes with the industrial clang of “Run Out’, the cacophony slowly converging into an alignment of percussion and space, trigerring that feeling of re-emerging into daylight at the end of a long night. Blinded by all the light... by all the possibilities.