Renick Bell

Renick Bell

Wary

Halcyon Veil

Halcyon Veil present Renick Bell’s long-awaited long-player, the follow up to his 2016 release for Lee Gamble's UIQ imprint.  "The 10 tracks on Wary come from Bell's practice of live coding in the algorave tradition; a distinct technique that involves manipulating a vast library of samples with text-based editing software. The album is an improvisatory gesture that sets him well apart from the DAW preset crowd, and one that equal influence from free jazz, King Tubby, Mark Fell, and Pan Sonic. Still, as the musician points out in a paper he authored in 2014, live coding isn't a genre; it's simply a performing method. To focus on the technique is to lose sight of the huge amount of flex and funk that's contained in these tracks, from the vivid, elastic bass of opener "Root of the Light," to the blissed-out dub pads and FX of "Recognizing Conditioning," or the racecar-fuel lead synth in "Cyclical Forces." These tracks, while constantly intricate, are just as often tuneful and memorable. "Resolute in Shedding" is a perfect example of Bell's disparate musical ingredients cohering into something with enough swagger to tear up a sound system or turn a dancefloor on its head. "Cliff-face Growth" similarly underpins its frantic high-register synth work with a staggering sub-bass kick that immediately pulls the listener into the club. The artwork, a bubbled hive of play buttons, comes courtesy of Jesse Osborne-Lanthier. The overlapping and swarming aspect of the art reflects the disorienting barrage of sounds that Renick...

Renick Bell

Empty Lake EP

UIQ

The angular, abstract funk of Renick Bell’s Empty Lake EP for Lee Gamble’s UIQ is perhaps exactly what you might expect from a pioneer of algoraves - a forward-looking union of live coding and rave music that’s currently taking computer boffins out of the studio/bedroom and placing them in real, physical spaces to hear what happens. To date, beyond the live algoraves, Bell’s music has mostly been contained in his chaotic Fractal Beats series on soundcloud and thoroughly unpackaged in academic papers on live coding and pragmatic aesthetic theory. With the Empty Lake EP he offers a refinement of the ideas in Fractal Beats, skilfully teasing out a tangle of post techno pulses, shards of catty ballroom house, hardcore kuduro and filigree footwork patterns twisted into shimmering, convulsive contours and unstable, scattered melodies.In an obvious sense, his sound is heavily compatible with the recent Lanark Artefax 12” on UIQ and certainly finds sympathies with Lee Gamble’s most obtuse aspects, but it also feels more feral, overgrown that either of those artists’ work in a way that relishes his software’s capacity for creating wild new junctures of sound that effectively re-program his and our brains in real time while we’re listening.From the elasticated, recoiling swang of Trying To Control The Four Winds to the Patten-like melt of The Well and the fluctuating states of Surface Waters Flow Together, there’s a level of detail to these tracks which will become apparent on first listen, and which will continue to baffle your sense...