The music of Berlin-based Brit Samuel Kerridge bears a pitch-black complexion that firmly positions it alongside an entire strain of current electronic music. Elements of industrial, drone, noise, and club culture all find equal weight in Kerridge's world, just as they do with similarly minded peers such as the Haxan Cloak, Raime, and the Blackest Ever Black label. It helps that original artists from some of those disciplines have surfaced again, apparently rejuvenated. William Bennett from Whitehouse is throwing out incisive techno in his Cut Hands guise, while the dark wave electronics of Throbbing Gristle's Chris & Cosey were manifested to satisfyingly bracing effect in the Transverse and X-TG records. That's some tough company to keep for anyone punching the "gloom" setting on their sampler, although Kerridge's approach—building steadily through a series of EPs and signing to Peter Sutton and Karl O'Connor's longstanding Downwards label—hints that he's in this for the long term.
The atmosphere of Kerridge's debut full-length, A Fallen Empire, is immediately detectable without hearing a single note of the music inside. The cover features a man in his death throes, clutching his neck and about to fall. Song titles include "Black Sun", "Straight to Hell", and "Death is Upon Us". The shifts in tone throughout are slight, but significant. Some tracks deviate further into outright noise than others, with "Black Sun" floating away on overlapping waves of shrill sound at its close. Elsewhere, Kerridge amplifies the industrial influence; "Straight to Hell" is all metallic D.A.F. drums pummelling away over grinding electronics. The mood is somewhere between sleazy and downcast, alternately embracing a misspent evening and its bitter aftermath. There are nihilistic thrills aplenty, but to dismiss A Fallen Empire as just that would be missing a layer or two of significance. Kerridge appears just as interested in meditative blackout, steering this album into small circles of introspection at key points.
It’s when A Fallen Empire steps off the brutalist treadmill that it gets most interesting. "Scare Tactics" taps into outright paranoia, drifting close to the surveillance society neuroses of Photek's classic drum and bass cut "The Hidden Camera". It's a wise move by Kerridge to take on these different shades, making A Fallen Empire stand apart from his peers' current race into the shadows. The consequential downside is that some of the more somber material doesn't stretch far enough away from things happening elsewhere, with tracks such as "Heavy Metal" and "Disgust" edging a little too close to the area so expertly dominated by the Haxan Cloak on Excavation. Still, it's rare that a track passes without a suitably degraded loop holding the attention, or with a brain-battering beat set in motion with the intent to trounce all around it. The central figure that surfaces in "Disgust" suggests a primitive machine endlessly ticking away, its original purpose long since forgotten.
A recent interview with Kerridge pinpointed the moment where he discovered electronics, at the age of four when his parents immersed him in the U.K. acid house scene. On the surface it's an odd juxtaposition to the music he makes now, where the traditional feel-good vibes of clubland are trampled underfoot. But read a little deeper into that interview, or into the history of illegal raves, and stories of guns, violence, and strongarm police tactics are never far away. A Fallen Empire is brutal at times, lonely at others. It resembles a sober wake up call after years of the come-together sloganeering that forms a significant part of club culture. Perhaps it's a stretch to imagine this album as the inevitable consequence of a kid being immersed in a scene that ostensibly promoted peace and togetherness, only to find a gun waved in his face. But Kerridge's story isn’t so different from that of Margaret Chardiet, the New Yorker recording brutal noise as Pharmakon, whose punk obsessive parents introduced her to the mosh pit at a young age. Like Chardiet, there’s a grain of experience here, a sense that this music is coming from an uncomfortably personal place.
