The London producer Zomby may have one eye trained firmly on the future, but he has never been one to neglect the past. His 2008 debut album, Where Were U In ’92?, was one of rave revivalism’s first major statements. Mercury’s Rainbow, an album recorded “over an intense couple of weeks” somewhere around the release of his debut (but only now seeing the light of day), finds Zomby revisiting another of his musical touchstones: the glacial eskibeat sound that Wiley pioneered in the early 2000s on tracks like “Eskimo,” “Ice Rink,” and “Ground Zero,” which drained UK garage of all its warmth, replacing heat with minimal synth melodies, corporeal bass, and sparse percussive touches.
Zomby has made no secret of his admiration for Wiley, with whom he eventually worked, in 2015, on “Step 2001.” It is tempting to see Mercury’s Rainbow as a simple homage to eskibeat, a reverent cousin to Where Were U In ’92?’s throwback rave. Wiley used a limited (if hugely distinctive) sonic palette on his eski recordings, leaning heavily on the Korg Triton’s Gliding Squares preset along with percussive clicks, clinks, and stomps that were rumoured to be taken from a Nintendo “Ice Hockey” game (but which FACT later located on E-mu’s Planet Phatt unit). Zomby avails himself of many of these sounds on Mercury’s Rainbow, with the “ice puck” clicks on tracks like “Choke” and “Static” enough to send most early-2000s ravers into Proustian revery. The vast open spaces and minimal makeup, with drum sounds replaced by a rhythmic array of thuds, taps, and clicks, are clearly indebted to Wiley. And throughout, Zomby uses the eski formula of simple bass-synth riffs that continuously evolve, jumping up and down octaves or shifting in tone.
But there is far more to Mercury’s Rainbow than mere imitation. While Zomby may borrow elements from classic eski, he also throws in new sounds, creating his own distinctive sonic palette, from the strident “yaw” vocal sample that lends percussive weight to 15 songs (Zomby calls it “a primal chant”) to the echoing splash on “Poison,” “Waterfall of Ice,” and “Patina.” Reusing the same sounds might be anathema to some electronic-music producers, but here it helps draw the album together, making for an intense, immersive listen. The celestial electronic experiments of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop also feel like an influence: the astral synth effects on tracks like “Delvaux” and “Horizon” could easily have soundtracked “Dr. Who”’s excursions into the icy darkness of outer space.
In 2008, Zomby had only been on the scene for a short while, and here he introduces some of the production quirks that would mark his later output. The brief, unexpected variation he makes on a riff in “Choke,” some 47 seconds in, pulls the rug out from underneath the unsuspecting listener—a trick he he would later employ at length on 2011 mini album Nothing. This is music that feels handmade, not machine-painted, loose rather than quantized, and the effect is head-spinning, full of shifting themes that fracture, dissolve, and remold like ice sculptures refreezing in new and unsettling shapes. When an idea has run its course Zomby simply stops, and the 16 tracks on Mercury’s Rainbow rattle by in just over 38 minutes.
Despite its minimalism, Mercury’s Rainbow sees Zomby give full reign to his considerable melodic skills, constructing both nagging riffs that elevate the song (as on the title track, “Atoms,” and “Silver Ocean”) and frequently beautiful melodies, such as the ethereal violin sound in the background of “Tet5uo” that teases the song’s sliding synth riff. These elements come together on the wonderful “Waterfall of Ice,” which combines an eerily beautiful, proto-“Stranger Things” melody with a moody descending bass riff, “ice puck” clicks, and a lone, angry hi-hat hiss.
Mercury’s Rainbow is both naggingly familiar and singularly odd. Had it been released in 2009, it might have been celebrated as a companion piece to Where Were U In ’92?; had it come out in 2014, it would have sat well with the emerging “weightless” sound of Mumdance and Logos. In 2018 it feels strangely out of time: a decade-old work by a forward-thinking producer paying homage to a musical genre that he has long since abandoned. But maybe this incongruity is appropriate. Zomby has long followed his own path, one occasionally out of step with musical fashion. Mercury’s Rainbow is both a fascinating example of British dance music’s ability to regurgitate its past and a telling work of Zomby’s singular talent.
