Primitive World

Primitive World

The Revolt Of Aphrodite

Ecstatic Recordings

“Throwing himself into bouts of taut, fractious, and probing electronics on his sophomore LP, ‘The Revolt of Aphrodite’, Sam Wills uses the same palette as found on his ‘White On White LP’ - PPG Wave, Kurzweil K250, Emulator 4 and Lexicon 224 - albeit with a finer manipulation of form. Oscillating between the Alva Noto/ Anne-James Chaton-esque minimalism of ‘All This Vulgar Data’, to the cubist UKFunky rhythms in ‘Iolanthe Dances’ and Dego-like broken beats in ‘Skins Plastered With White Lead’, we end up in the curdled electronic sensuality on ’The Foetus Of a Love Song’ which gives the album a deftly imaginative and playful dimension that stands in contrast to the homogeneity of much of modern electronic music’s all-too-often blinkered dreams. Following a similar process that was applied to the visual cues of overlooked British constructivist Marlow Moss in his 2018 debut, and recent lysergic rescoring of Kubrick’s ‘Full Metal Jacket’, Willis employs a strategy of in/direct references to Durrell’s seminal ’60s sci-fi diptych ‘The Revolt of Aphrodite’ - comprising the novels ’Tunc’ and ‘Nunquam’ - in an absorbing re-imagining of its scenes, rendered in a mix of electronic shrapnel, craftily disrupted UK club rhythms, and stuttering vocaloids. The original books’ themes of “Nietzchean psycho-sexual satire”, and their acerbic, bawdy, densely allusive text, serve to push Primitive World toward more complex drum programming/editing and a finer spectrum of timbres in order to best transpose the stories into music. Set against a backdrop of the May 1968 general strike in...

Primitive World

White On White

Ecstatic Recordings

“Following a major retrospective at The Tate St Ives, forgotten art maverick Marlow Moss (1889-1958) - a radical, gender-bending British Jewish lesbian and innovator of non-figurative art - is the inspiration and the focus of this new LP from Primitive World for the Ecstatic label. Crafted from various synth improvisations, including the rare and tricky PPG Wave synth/sampler, it comes highly recommended if you’re into Peder Mannerfelt’s brut ambient, Raster Noton’s grid-based rhythmic fascinations, or Pan Sonic at their most glacial.  White On White forms a follow-up of sorts to Willis’ Ascention tape, and perhaps more aptly, leads on from his and Not Waving's reworks of Daphne Oram - arguably another overlooked, British female pioneer of her field - which are collected on their Walls album, Sound Houses. There’s little doubt that this new album contains some of Willis’ strongest solo work, which can be attributed to the fecund inspiration of Moss’s work, life and theories, as well as his access to a prized arsenal of rare vintage synths.  Titled after the Moss piece which adorns the LP’s front cover, White On White forms a welcome first introduction for many to Moss’s “work, life and theories” thru a combination of visual representations - photographs of the artist and her work - with text by Lucy Howarth, curator of Moss’s recent exhibitions at Museum Haus Konstruktiv exhibition (2017), the touring Tate display (2013-15), and of course the music itself, which seeks to describe Moss’s mathematically sound geometries and evocative...