Steven Julien is a committed disciple of the jam econo. Since 2009, recording mostly as FunkinEven, the London electronic musician has specialized in a jubilantly no-frills strain of house and techno. His rugged workouts for a stripped-down setup of synthesizer and drum machine are unvarnished, unfussy, and unsentimental. Often recorded in single takes, they have a gestural quality to them, like the arc of a hand slicing through air. And they tend to move in one direction: forward.
A lot of the same qualities hold true for Fallen, his debut album, and his first major release under his own name. It’s not lo-fi, exactly, but it's proudly bare bones, giving no corner to excess. There’s no advanced digital signal processing here, no fantastical sound design, no psychoacoustic sleight-of-hand—just gnarled acid sequences, bare-knuckle drum programming, and drifting synths. In most cases, the technology behind these tunes hasn’t changed much, if at all, in the past 30-odd years; nor, for that matter, has their style.
He covers a lot of ground: “Jedi” is smooth, pinging techno in the vein of Jeff Mills or Robert Hood. “XL,” which he made some 15 years ago, as he told The Wire, brandishing an old floppy disc on which he'd saved the song, teases rolling jazz piano over an excitable house rhythm, ragged filters in constant motion. “Kingdom” is a spacious, starry-eyed acid cut similar to Joey Anderson or Levon Vincent; its structure is simple, but the dimensions suggested by its spiraling arpeggios are vast and expansive. “Reficul” is a greasy, mean-mugging drum-machine fugue in the spirit of “Night,” a 2012 collaboration with Kyle Hall under their Funkinevil alias, and “Disciple” is a thrilling explosion of breakbeats and stuttering horn stabs that throws off energy as though exorcising demons.
But Fallen also marks an important shift from Julien’s earlier work. While there are plenty of storming club cuts here, the whole thing is more varied, more nuanced, and more contemplative than any other record in his catalog. “Begins,” an ambient miniature that opens the record with mercurial timbres and complex harmonies, sets up a full-on jazz fusion number in the form of “Chantel,” flush with digital chimes, flute synth, and squirrely bass work reminiscent of Jaco Pastorius or Stanley Clarke. (It comes as no surprise to learn that Julien cites Plastic People’s Co-Op parties as a major influence; jazz fusion and electric soul played a huge part in the development of the broken-beat aesthetic.)
Fallen is clearly a transitional record for Julien. He recently told The Wire, “I don't like half the stuff I’ve released. This is exactly where I’m at in my head at the moment and hopefully forever.” The album dramatizes that transition in its sequencing. Broken into two halves, it follows a loose kind of narrative, with the first half bathed in warm colors and rich harmonies and the tangled second half caked in grit and worry before emerging into the rosy glow of its ambient outro. The dichotomy is clearest in the juxtaposition of two songs at the album's center. “Oshun,” named after a fertility spirit from the Yoruba and Ifá religions, is a shuffling, meditative cut whose earthy, swirling tones evoke a whiff of petrichor; with “Fallen,” we burrow underground to the tune of a brooding, minor-key synth melody. It’s the album’s darkest moment, and also its most unembellished, just a spindly series of notes pacing up and down the scale for three-and-a-half minutes. It digs a bleak pit smack dab in the middle of the album, a black hole of worry against which everything else shines that much brighter.
It’s easy to make moody electronic music, but it’s harder, and riskier, to pull off something as stark as “Fallen.” But Julien is skilled at achieving complex ideas using modest means, and part of the pleasure of Fallen is the mutability of its emotional terrain; pleasure is tinged with doubt, and fretfulness wears a halo of ecstasy. It’s a good record for introverts who love to dance, and dancers who can’t help but brood. In fact, although the title implies a particular trajectory, the album works just as well heard back to front; it may set up a dichotomy between light and dark, but its treatment of the subject turns out to be far more nuanced. On Fallen, FunkinEven’s one-way streets of yore have funneled into a mazelike warren of alleyways that invites and rewards extended exploration.
