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LP
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SUB 004LP
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2015 repress. LP version. Continuing the re-emergence of Bristol's Subtext label, former Vex'd artist Roly Porter presents his debut solo album Aftertime, which fuses his background in bleeding edge British sound system music with experimental compositional strategies and a forensic attention to detailed sound design. The results explore the terrain of an emerging industrial classical aesthetic, connecting new approaches to digital manipulation and processing with the instrumentation of chamber music in an immersive examination of texture and tonality. Aftertime connects the dots between the legacy of dubstep and seminal jungle labels such as Metalheadz and Full Cycle while absorbing aspects of noise, drone and contemporary classical. Haunting angular assaults crafted across the 11 tracks create a logical post script to Porter's roots in Vex'd, the seminal dubstep project launched in 2004, that adopted the tropes of bass production and sonic detailing inherent in sound system culture and translated them into a highly atmospheric dark ambient progression. Aftertime radiates a central narrative tension between themes of nature and technology, the ancient and modern, and the real and synthetic, revealing a compulsive cinematic netherworld, like a communiqué from an earth ravaged by science. The use of instrumentation, in particular the haunting tones of the Ondes Martenot (performed here by Cynthia Millar) reflects Porter's fascination with rare and dying technologies, the Martenot being playable by only a remaining handful of performers. Placing this rare instrument's eerie aesthetics alongside muscular sheets of noise and heavily machined tones, the album maps out a compositional territory that chronicles a dying sonic language while ushering in the dawning of the new. At the outer edges of this map, Aftertime stands as a re-imagined present -- an apparition of a mythologized past and an unreachable future.
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