Blawan has always come across as kind of a bruiser. Consider the tattoos on the UK producer's knuckles—"KICK" on the right, "DRUM" on the left—or the fact that his chosen alias reads like an onomatopoeic transcription of comic-book violence. His name feels vaguely like mouthing an explosion, and his music has followed suit. Full of jackhammering kicks, splintered wooden percussion, and short-fuse breakdowns, it's typically as volatile as a coffee-tin full of gunpowder.
Granted, Blawan's music has never been hard simply for the sake of being hard: Just see "Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage", in which he flips a Fugees sample into what sounds like the unhinged ranting of a serial killer and then piles screams and clangs and abattoir-grade reverb on top. That campy-scary tune, released in 2012, turned into an unexpected breakout hit: It's racked up close to a million plays on YouTube, Skrillex was playing it in his sets for a while, and the Irish quartet Girl Band even covered the song, returning it to the slash-and-burn punk rock that obviously inspired it.
But Blawan's latest releases display a much subtler approach. The change is right there in the title of the recent inaugural EP on his TERNESC label: Warm Tonal Touch. He's been making music with an all-hardware setup for a while now, but the first two records on his new label represent a new set of limitations, having been made entirely with modular synthesizers. You wouldn't necessarily know that from listening to them; where many modular users slip down rabbit-holes of complex evolving sequences or get tangled up in cat's cradles of blips and blurps, Blawan uses his machines more for color and shading—darkly lustrous streaks, silvery scribbles, crushed chalk smeared against a backdrop of woven Kevlar. It's not self-consciously "synthesizer music" in the way that a lot of modular creations are; it's still techno to the core.
The drums still come first, and they, too, are sourced from his modular setup. Why does this matter? It might not to the dancers, but for anyone interested in the myriad decisions that happen between turning on a power strip and turning out a finished track, it's notable that he's opted to go without the standard-issue kicks and snares that animate 99.99% of dance records; instead, he's carved his sounds from scratch, sculpting white noise into scratchy patterns that approximate techno's boom-tick template without simply replicating it. In "Hanging Out the Birds" and "Mine Oh Mine", the beats move in rippling patterns untethered to anything as obvious as a bass drum; instead of pumping in time to techno's conventional throb, they seem to slide across the surface, like water striders. "Hanging Out the Birds" is strangely relaxed and fleshed out with diffuse, almost beatific tones; "Mine Oh Mine", with its rapid-fire pitter-pat and chromatic churn, is a nail-biter made even more nerve-wracking by its refusal to reach anything like a climax. Only a soothing spoken-word bit offers the occasional respite from the roil.
With its heavier pulse and whip-cracking backbeats, "Weakening Force" is more like Blawan's previous records, but it sounds like it's been sanded down and worn away; it is to his more full-bodied work as a grave rubbing is to the granite slab. The heaviest (and best) of the bunch is "Diatonic Valves", which charges forward like a lawnmower chewing up gravel and yet still manages to be graceful, even lyrical, even though the sole melodic element is a banshee's wail that snakes dolefully through the upper register. For being so stripped down and so rough around the edges, it packs an incredible amount of tone, and emotion, into its swollen midrange, bringing to mind the ragged-yet-ethereal sound of Basic Channel at their most relentless. It's a tantalizing glimpse of where Blawan might go next—sheathing the tats in velvet gloves without sacrificing an ounce of force.
