It seems like there should be a little more perplexing mystery to Sd Laika than there actually is: Peter Runge is basically a guy from Milwaukee with a low-key social media presence and enough of a distinct game plan to wind up on the same label as Forest Swords and Evian Christ. But Runge's music possesses an unnerving sense of man-machine fusion that sends viscera burbling out your speakers—the kind of glitched-out muck that leaves a permanent stain on everything in hearable radius and makes one thankful that you can't actually smell music. It's gruesomely tactile, dank stuff, the kind of keyboard gut-ripping that primarily resembles grime in the "Crime scene clean-up" sense of the word.
Two years ago, Runge put out the Unknown Vectors EP, which took the more abrasive qualities of grime and bass music, sharpened their edges to the border of discomfort, and kicked their surefooted steps out from beneath them to leave their rhythms scrambling. Since then, he's only pushed that discomfort further, something that his new LP That's Harakiri brings to deeper fruition. There's some real agitation on this thing—beats that rattle like a loose drive belt, ambient percussion that sounds sourced from the static left after Earth's last radio transmission, gurgling drones on some "all glory to the Hypnotoad" shit—and there's no real accessible way into it.
The sick stuff's enough to shake off the unwary, and the opening one-two of "Peace" and "Great God Pan" put the most difficult aspects of Runge's music right up front. The former's a scrambled broadcast that pits trebly squeaks of inside-out digital strings against heaving meat-slab synth, resembling less a beat than a creeping caustic ooze. The latter track throws out the pastoral flute-tootling its title might imply in favor of glo-fi catatonia; there's analog hisses that give off enough neon heat to leave blisters, while a machine shop's worth of misfiring pistons plays percussion. While there are signs of order to grab on to—the straightforward 808 boom-clap beat that marches through closer "Percressing," or the batterram 4/4 kicks that churn through the loud-yet-minimalist "Remote Heaven"—the sense of short-circuit disorder is never far away, which gives That's Harakiri the feel of pulling order through chaos. Noise interference is ramped up, as are counterintuitive rhythms and ugly chords, only to tie them all together into an unexpected sort of cohesion.
The mutated-grime signifiers give his songs a bit of grounding; there are these juddering Wiley-style Eski beats and bleeps in "I Don't" and "You Were Wrong" that move a little funny because they've lost a few toes to frostbite. And the pulse really does get insistently catchy once you've given in to the havoc: for all the moaning buzzes and Tesla-coil sparks that scorch its surface, "Meshes" also has a remarkably supple and intricate chattering beat down beneath that could goe toe-to-toe with your favorite Major Lazer cut for ass-shaking potential. There's a sense here that Runge is reacting to the clockwork sleekness and futurist warmth of Grime 2.0 and Night Slugs/Fade to Mind bass music with deliberate violence—not out of hostility, just a fascination with what happens when all those parts start malfunctioning. In the case of That's Harakiri, that malfunction just turns out to be another kind of fine working order.
