Sam Shackleton's career began in the shadows and he's pretty much remained there since. He looked for inspiration past Britain's borders, to Berlin and beyond, at a time when dubstep's nucleus remained embedded deep within a South London postcode. Alloying a steely rhythmic exoskeleton to a sound still largely regarded as a ghostly mutation of 2-step, the run of 12"s on his Skull Disco label successfully ushered the first wave of techno-dubstep hybrids into clubs before it folded in 2008.
That sombre tone and gloomy imagery has become a hallmark since, pressed everywhere from a fêted Ricardo Villalobos remix through to more recent work, incorporating uncommon instrumentation and Middle Eastern motifs. The producer crafts detailed headspaces and then erodes their parameters, invoking a level of uncertainty and crumbled-spliff paranoia. His exacting focus on dread makes his extensive, and often brilliant, catalogue somewhat foreboding. It also instils immediate apprehension when approaching this perplexing new EP, his first after a nearly two year absence.
Freezing Opening Thawing's opener may be the most dramatic outlier in Shackleton's entire body of work, although not without some precedent: his sprawling "Mukuba Special" re-work on a 2010 Congotronics compilation is the nearest relative. There, the contrast between growling sub-bass and brittle guitar notes was the sonic manifestation of two worlds meeting. Here, the title track crams a head-spinning mesh of synthetic sounds into the heavily treated topline, hoovering up anything vaguely earthen and leaving behind a complete void of low-end.
The result is startling: marimba and mbira lines dart across one another at high velocity; oscillators spin out of control; the infectious lead is so over-processed that whatever its original components, it finishes up as sequenced distress signals escaping short-circuiting mainframes. Once it finally locks into a convulsing, serpentine rhythm, Shackleton begins layering stranger noises still: Transylvanian hammer horror riffage, clattering hooks, no-wave synth stabs. For someone who has admitted to spending months at a time perfecting a single drum loop, the torrential hail feels cast off at random, triggered in real-time on an ironing-board's worth of cheap circuit-bent instruments. It's the sound of Shackleton cutting loose in delirious, utterly entrancing fashion.
Given the sensory overload, the pair of tracks that follow offer some breathing room and a human touch. Chinking metallurgy and a collapsing bassline warm up "White Flower With Silvery Eye", ushering in a more linear progression before ducking out for a Deliverance-style showdown between two diametrically opposed percussive factions: digitized blip versus palmed drum skin. That odd juxtaposition is magnified on "Silver Keys", which begins with a grim monophonic MIDI dawn chorus and ends closest to a traditional Shackleton piece, closing out proceedings on a dark and ritualistic stomp. As opposed to the scabrous Coil-style feedback splayed across 2012's Music for the Quiet Hour, here the rich didgeridoo drone is somewhat comforting against the eerie melody; unusual but not necessarily unnatural.
Precious little unity binds Freezing Thawing Opening: the tracks are bright and glossy, fully blanched of color, and a sterility hangs in the atmosphere. Any attempt at human connection is paltry, even by Shackleton's standards. But in spite of the EP's innate weirdness every track remains supremely danceable and this could be his most groove-centric release yet. He's bound to continue as the chin-scratcher's choice, but if anything, this EP's about face will only add to Shackleton's peculiar magnetism.
