Colonial Patterns is a fine album title, suggesting so much yet giving little away. Read it one way and it's an allusion to the arrogance that nations are doomed to repeat. Glance again and it conjures up the lines that such behavior razes, replaces, and retraces on the land. Both readings reverberate throughout Kansas City producer Brian Leeds’ debut album as Huerco S. It follows a handful of 12”s and cassettes on exemplary small labels from both sides of the Atlantic-- including Opal Tapes and Future Times-- and sounds like the work of an artist hitting his stride, rather than one making his first big statement.
Leeds’ focus is the hidden histories of his homeland in the American midwest. He signposts as much with titles like “Quivira” named for a mythical place “discovered” by a Spanish explorer in the 16th century, “Canticoy”, a word of Native American origin that means a lively social gathering, and “Monks Mound (Arcology)”, which is an ancient earthwork in Illinois. References aside, his music is heavy with layers, symbols, and signals. Form wise, he takes futurism’s theme tune-- techno-- and filters it through yesterday’s technology: cassettes, synths, and cheap software. The ensuing collision of temporal zones creates a bewildering, all-encompassing present, which might be why Colonial Patterns presents a soundtrack for both blunting jet lag and long road trips in which the landscape is continuously cut and framed by the windshield window.
“Plucked from the Ground, Toward the Sun” moves like cloud formations, calling to mind school science classes and the water cycle chart that detailed water’s cyclic shapeshifting from evaporation to precipitation. “Skug Commune” sounds like a forgotten quiet storm song trying to break through a broken transistor radio, or a conversation half lost down a faulty line, while the raw metallic percussion of “Quivira” evokes an image of acid rain falling on aluminum cutlery.
There are a number of contrasts and conflicts between the natural and manmade world. “'Iińzhiid” laps and rolls like water, its rhythms reflecting and refracting into an infinite horizon. On “Struck with Deer Lungs”, the circling sub-bass turns with the exhausted pallor of an ancient ceiling fan. Lead single “Prinzif” is weighted with a creeping anxiety that smacks of Twin Peaks, a not-so unusual relationship when you consider the cult TV show is probably the most successful illustration of contemporary culture’s fear of the ancient/(super)natural and modern/manmade worlds colliding.
Of course, Colonial Patterns does not exist in a vacuum. There is dialogue with Actress and Laurel Halo’s handling of techno as a form not immune to time, one that can disintegrate just like the vast metropolises that inspired it, leaving fragments that distill into something new once again. Oneohtrix Point Never's Replica and Forest Swords’ Engravings are also relatives, for their exploration of the nature of memory and excavation of history respectively. Like his contemporaries, Huerco S. seeks to unearth new languages-- trace new patterns-- within established musical world orders. In his hands, techno is a folk music in the traditional sense: a music that carries remnants of the past into the future. The final track “Angel (Phase)” is both culmination and affirmation of his archaeological digs: a vision of an ancient ambient techno gathering bathed in campfire light and dreaming into the night.
