*30 minute EP follow-up to Miles' recent 'Faint Hearted' album for Modern Love, mastered by Matt Colton* An addendum of sorts to his recent 'Faint Hearted' album, Miles' returns with a half-hour EP more squarely aimed at the floor with four darkened, robust variants. 'Blatant Statement' is up first, slowly emerging from a rough alignment of metallic percussion and abrasive stabs not a million miles removed from the kind of racket you'd most likely associate with Vatican Shadow, before the almost-clipped rub of those super-warm bass stabs shifts the perspective to a different kind of environment altogether. 'Technocracy' delivers an oozing House deconstruction, slowed down and inebriated, while 'Infinite Jest' revolves around an industrial cacophony harnessed into a rhythmic anomaly situated somewhere between a technofied Pete Swanson and a sweaty Kassem Mosse. 'Plutocracy' ends the set with a bleached-out warehouse chug, slowed down and menacing, surrounded by a submerged choral arrangement and more of that toughened hammered-metal sound that runs through the EP.
MP3 $3.96
06/03/2013
Miles has been releasing material on Modern Love for a decade, first as one half of Pendle Coven, then on his own as MLZ, and eventually pairing up with Sean Canty to record as Demdike Stare. In between he’s also pursued more experimental terrain under the Suum Cuique moniker, produced Jungle for the HATE project and (together with Andy Stott) taken on the occasional release as Millie & Andrea for Modern Love sublabel Daphne. He is also an admired, exhilarating DJ, his sets have been known to span a broad spectrum of electronic music, from the obscure UK techno of labels like Radioactive Lamb and Irdial, to classic Chicago House, Detroit Techno and – most importantly – early 90’s jungle and breakbeat, feeding into his love of the most uncompromising end of the Italian experimental movement, Musique Concrète, Synthwave and contemporary Noise. After more than 10 years of producing, “Faint Hearted” is his debut solo album. ‘Faint Hearted’ is an exposition of Miles’ love of electronic music in all its shapes, harnessing his fidgety production style into one expansive, restless set of tracks. The album opens with the filtered and looped Jungle mutation of ‘Lebensform’, through to the minimal, barely-noticeable bass-shifts of ‘Irreligious’, the classic Plastikman-infused looped ruffage of ‘Status Narcissism’ and the padded bliss of “Sense Data”, coming across like a lost Move D production from the classic Studio Pankow era. The second half opens with ‘Rejoice’, a slowly-unfurling 4/4 variant that sounds like a more technofied and electric...
MP3 $7.92
04/08/2013
Miles Whittaker has been an integral part of the Modern Love label since its inception in 2002 - as one half of both Pendle Coven and Demdike Stare, as well as his own productions under the MLZ and Millie monikers. After almost 15 years writing music, this is the first release Miles is putting out under his own name and marks a turning point of sorts in his production style, or rather, in its sequencing. The Facets EP brings together different ends of his production style, unifying elements of the House and Techno he’s most commonly released as MLZ together with the more broken production signatures usually reserved for Millie and the darkened tribalism of Demdike Stare. “Flawed” opens the set with a Linn loop from the archives, stretched and slowed down with an intoxicated aesthetic that’s somewhere between House and Dub, before “Lustre” re-configures source material originally keyed in by labelmate Andy Stott with a nice line in squashed percussion. ‘Primer’ on the flip extends from a Demdike Stare outtake and veers off into an analogue drum machine workout, before “On The Fly” ends the set with a recording made straight to mixing desk from an array of mis-wired and malfunctioning drum boxes, contact microphones and samplers, over at his studio The Mill earlier this year.
MP3 $3.96
08/08/2011