The vaults of electronic mischief spun from the fingertips of Cornish musician Luke Vibert are apparently well-stocked. Like his fellow West Country dweller Aphex Twin, Vibert appears to have a dearth of unreleased material yet to see the light of day. These days most musicians and music fans have some form of useless archive-- the simultaneous rise of the mp3 and computer-based sequencing software guaranteed that a surfeit of recorded music would lay dormant on hard drives across the globe. Back when Vibert was starting out, at some point in the early 1990s, he seems to have been a digital junk soothsayer, amassing a great body of work while the rest of us were tooling away on Prodigy message boards and getting to grips with AOL for DOS. Unlike the rest of ours, his binary debris actually seems to have some value.
In 1995, Vibert released a series of EPs under the name Plug, which served as a catchall moniker to present his typically twisted take on drum'n'bass. An album, Drum 'n' Bass for Papa, followed a year later, around the time he was being courted by major labels. Trent Reznor's Nothing Records released Drum 'n' Bass for Papa in the U.S., handily packaging it with the prior EPs. As the popularity of the genre waned, Vibert wisely bailed on Plug, instead choosing one of his many other aliases to work under. But he couldn't shake what once seemed like a one-off fudging of popular genre tropes. In 2006, an EP titled Here It Comes emerged, comprising four unreleased Plug tracks. Now we've got another clearing of the vaults, this time in the shape of a full-length LP comprised of Plug recordings Vibert made from 1995-1998.
The original Plug records skirted under the radar of most serious drum'n'bass heads. It lacked the pile-driving ferocity of most Metalheadz releases and/or the jazz-tinged seriousness of Good Looking's output. There were other shades of drum'n'bass, of course, but very few of them touched on humor, which remains a common touchstone for many of Vibert's projects. It's unlikely he was looking to hold down a residency at the Blue Note in pre-hip Hoxton (ironically, the same venue where his current label, Ninja Tune, hosted their legendary Stealth nights). Instead, he always seemed happiest working in his own sphere, which, for Plug, meant blurring the lines between the bloodless white-knuckle ride of drum'n'bass and the easy listening boom that was gathering pace around the mid 1990s.
Back on Time is barely separable from Drum 'n' Bass for Papa; it's essentially more of the same. Vibert's breakbeats still writhe and skitter, methodically contorted around his eccentric choice of samples. On "A Quick Plug for a New Slot", a lumbering beat slugs lethargically into the mix before a pinging sitar line forces everything to lurch into a sprightlier clip. The excellently titled "Come on My Skeleton" feels like it's straining under the weight of its own excesses, with fat slabs of industrialized sound vying with twists of an opera singer climbing up into her higher range. The latter ends with Vibert pulling a rabbit out of the hat in the form of a straight-laced man claiming, "you might also become aware of your anus or genitalia." Even on this older material he's an expert at diffusing tension in that way, always ready with a banana peel to slip under the mix in case things are getting a little too serious.
That pranksterish approach is the point where most people either get on or off board with Vibert. On Back on Time, it works to his advantage, largely thanks to his ability to balance out his humorous inclinations with an unnerving ability to sequence it all over an impressively brutal infrastructure. On "Back on Time" he's able to filter John Barry-esque string parts through indecipherable vocal bellowing and a beat that floods the mix with its tinny timbre. Even the relatively subdued "Mind Bending" ends up stacked high with junk, with Speak & Spell-style speech synthesis vying for space with jerky analog loops and a wild-eyed raver shouting, "fucking excellent acid house." That form of maximal japery foreshadows the work of Rustie and James Ferraro, partially explaining why this material sounds fresh again. It's a kitchen sink-like flood of sound, always on the verge of resembling a gigantic curveball being forced down your throat, but with Vibert pulling back from the humor brink at all the right moments.
