German electronic label Mille Plateaux has always been a hit-or-miss affair with me. They specialize in very minimal music, best exemplified through the archetypal Clicks & Cuts series, in which the barest of sounds and glitches serve as building blocks for their artists’ work. Sometimes, it works wonderfully and sometimes, it’s just too dry and insubstantial. The best artists (Kit Clayton, Vladislav Delay) take these simple elements and build something shimmering and immersive, but too many others just lack the imagination.
Twerk is the alias of Shawn Hatfield, who uses found sounds and field-recordings to build music that’s surprisingly tangible given its ephermal foundations. He’s also a programmer who writes much of the software he uses for composition, but the process itself is thankfully a means and not an end. There’s nothing about this record that suggests an agenda, and it’s easily enjoyed on purely musical merits.
This is a very vibrant and organic record, sounding at times like Microstoria with a bit of air let in. Twerk knows how to make the most of very slight and disparate elements, but that’s pretty much where the comparisons to other Mille Plateaux artists ends. Much of the record sounds like snippets of radio broadcasts filtered in, but there’s almost always a solid underpinning to keep things in place.
The opening duo of “From Brown to Green/From Green to Brown” sets the mood, as slight wordless female vocals bob to the surface of a bright pool. The actual percussion is very minimal, but there’s enough textural interplay to keep a clear sense of time and movement. In the second piece, things are sped up and brought into sharper focus, though they’re still viewed through murky glass and hard to hold onto. There’s no melody to speak of, but individual parts seem to fall into place at just the right times to imply one. It’s a brilliant use of space and convergence that sounds much simpler and linear than it probably was to record.
Interludes like “Return to Hokkaido” are echoing bells and fluttering typewriter keys, while the full tracks like “Motala” and “Passage of Private Life” take a slightly skewed minimal-house approach that wouldn’t sound too out of place on a Basic Channel comp. “Thud+Vain=Road” is the album’s highlight, a sparse piece that seems random at first but reveals a complex system of layering on closer examination.
This is certainly a unique record, and I hope to hear more from this guy. I got my copy from Forced Exposure.