On his first appearance for Peak Oil, the Mancunian producer animates foreboding, percussive bass music with tricky details and Escherian grooves.
The artist known simply as Leo is a conductor of shards. He favors blunt attacks and sharp edges, and his overwhelmingly percussive club tracks move like flying debris. The Manchester musician’s preference for the fragmentary extends to his approach to genre. Good luck pegging his music to any one style; an individual track might contain a combination of grime, dembow, techno, drum’n’bass, dubstep, ambient, or industrial, and, having begun in one of those zones, there’s no guarantee it will end up in the same one—whenever you think you’ve got a bead on his music, that’s when he feints in the opposite direction.
Sometimes Leo switches things up between records: After two albums of terse, concussive club rhythms, he began 2023’s Lived I, recorded live in Manchester, with nearly 10 minutes of spectral drones and abstract gloop. And sometimes he zigzags within a single song. The title track of his 2021 album a buried river begins with a dystopian soundscape of foghorn bleats and metallic wheezing; a four-on-the-floor kick progresses in fits and starts, cowed by imposing blobs of bass, and four scant bars of sampled rapping disappear almost as quickly as they start, mulched into stuttering consonants beneath gothic keys and construction-site clang.
After a handful of records for Manchester outfits like Tom Boogizm’s $hotta Tapes and DJ Lyster’s YOUTH label, Cicada Burnt marks Leo’s first appearance on Los Angeles’ Peak Oil, the leftfield electronic imprint run by Kranky label manager Brian Foote. It’s a fitting home for the Mancunian’s music; like fellow Peak Oil acts Low End Activist, Wrecked Lightship, and Paperclip Minimiser, he seems determined to push that nebulous thing called bass music out of its calcified comfort zone, using contradiction and surprise to keep dancers on their toes.
The first thing you might notice on Cicada Burnt is its physicality. Trained as a drummer, Leo treats pretty much all his sounds as things to be struck, giving his sound design an unusually physical heft. The first thing we hear in opener “Qwershape,” aside from some scene-setting streaks of color, resembles a cueball being tapped against the floor in a long, marble hallway. The effect is almost dizzyingly tactile, and the rest of the album’s palette follows suit. Short, sharp shocks are cocooned in empty space. Bass tones inspired by the TR-808 hit like medicine balls to the chest. Battered metal is as crucial to his kit as conventional drum sounds, and even his tonal elements feel as malleable as wrung-out sponges or wet lumps of clay. There are few actual notes to his melodies, just smudges and stains.
Even with his arte povera materials, Leo can turn out a banger when he wants to: Take “Jetti,” a ruthlessly reduced fusion of electro snap and dubwise chords that pummels and haunts in equal measure. The syncopated snare patterns are precision-tooled funk; drum hits are mirrored by a squawking sound that suggests a mischievous little demon lurking deep in the mix, underscoring the album’s omnipresent sense of foreboding. But few other tracks here are quite so rhythmically straightforward. Instead, Leo tends to tease climaxes that never come, preferring to let his nail-bitten fugues simply stew in place before dissipating again. On the album’s title track and “Descant,” the approach can occasionally feel frustrating, even miserly—would a little release be so bad?
But based on the album’s closing one-two punch, he knows just what he’s doing. Penultimate track “Spirit Level (Prescript)” is an extended headfake of plunging bass tones and Autechre-like chirps that steadfastly refuses to kick into gear; then, in “Spirit Level,” all the same elements lock together into a quick-stepping techno juggernaut. At eight minutes, it’s the album’s longest track by a considerable margin, and you get the sense that it could just keep going forever—coasting forward, doubling back, creating an Escherian illusion of ascent while simply circling in place. After an album’s worth of shuddering, stop-start energy, the frictionless “Spirit Level” arranges the same palette of pulverized bits into a flowing approximation of endlessness—a payoff that makes everything that’s come before feel all the more intentional.
