Laurie Osborne and Adam Winchester have a way of bringing out the inner adventurer in each other. Not that the Berlin-based DJs have ever been boxed in by genre: Winchester first emerged from Bristol’s dubstep scene as Wedge and has grown into a voracious noise sculptor, even teaching seminars on sound design. Osborne, meanwhile, has touched on dub, breakbeat, techno, and garage under his Appleblim moniker. But together as Wrecked Lightship, the two musicians tease an otherworldly club logic out of their combined sensibilities. Dubby basslines radiate with the soft glow of the setting sun. Alien synth stabs break apart like machinery casting off a crash-landing rocket. Every tone seems to be in the process of decay, crunching and crackling as if in the throes of their final transmission.
Where Wrecked Lightship’s nebulous Peak Oil debut last year leaned into their more abstract instincts, Drained Strands, their fourth album, ups the rhythmic factor considerably, incorporating molten textures into a more driving set of tracks. Think Kenny Larkin’s cybernetic techno, but drenched in the hypnotic surface noise of Pole and bolstered with the weight of Porter Ricks’ mulched thump. It’s still better suited to sinking into your couch than tearing up the dancefloor, but Osborne and Winchester’s floating bass patterns and spine-tickling hi-hats imbue everything with a deathly urgency. Osborne delights in the tension between human imperfection and mechanical precision. “I like the idea of both always trying to do what the other can’t,” he has said: “Machines trying to sound human and humans trying to sound like machines.” Drained Strands comes alive in the smeared interzone where technology fuses with the organic.
Wrecked Lightship’s music exists in a dark, dank world not unlike that of Osborne’s former Skull Disco label partner Shackleton, their rhythms so solvent they could slip through your fingers. Even the duo’s more straightforward songs thrive in their aqueous details: “Reeling Mist” bears their most clearly defined melody yet, but the real joy is in the staticky signals that roll up and down the track, or the swaying garage snare that click-clacks with just the right amount of echo. It’s a trip-hoppy piece of comedown lounge ammo; “Lagoon,” on the other hand, plunges straight into the abyss, as Osborne and Winchester ground their slippery downtempo claps with deep, enveloping rounds of throbbing bass. The title track opens the album on a magnificent charge, a time-warped footwork beat dodging between blood-red synths that flit like security beams in some dystopian jailbreak.
Osborne and Winchester are at their strongest when charting strange new rabbit holes through their many influences, but the purely ambient passages here are less gripping. “Ultra Red” and “Somnium Sands” rest entirely on straightforward drones that run as long as six minutes without offering much beyond some eerie sound design. They’re passable as a zone-out-inducing rest stop in between the more propulsive voyages, but as sketches they probably didn’t need to take up a full third of the album. Wrecked Lightship have no trouble pulling you into the fog with just their ghostly rhythms; for two vets who have been around the block, they’re still treating dance music like an ancient mystery waiting to be solved.
