By its own description, the Bristol-based electronic duo Emptyset makes music as a meta-study of the relationship between sound, surface, space, gear, and process. Given how freely Emptyset’s Paul Purgas and James Ginzburg expound on those relationships in academic terms, you might expect the pair's work to drip with intellectualism. Between them, Purgas and Ginzburg actually do have academic backgrounds—in art, design, and music. So it’s no surprise that they’ve turned to spaces such as London’s Ambika P3 testing bunker for commissioned installation projects, and that such spaces have served as one of Emptyset’s primary habitats over the project’s 12-year history.
Taken on its own, however, Emptyset’s music can be surprisingly single-minded. Borders, the band’s fifth studio full-length (its first for Thrill Jockey following a string of releases for electronic labels like Subtext and Raster-Noton) can be boiled-down to three words: throbbing, bassy, sinister. More aggressive and pulse-driven than Emptyset’s last studio album, 2013’s Recur, Borders hits your senses with a brute force that belies Ginzburg and Purgas’ conceptual approach to making sounds. The album opens with a flickering, short-lived wash of static that gets swallowed by a low-end thrum, a sound that pretty much persists from that point onwards until the final track concludes.
These repetitive bursts of bass-frequency shrapnel go through significant changes—the timbre, layering, tempos, and intervals all morph from track to track—but the central pattern and rhythmic attack remain constant as the pulses come one after another after another. And once the pattern shifts from album opener “Body” to a similar pattern on “Border,” Purgas and Ginzburg establish relentless repetition as one of the album’s primary features. It doesn’t take long before Borders induces a meditative effect not unlike when you stare at ocean waves for long periods.
Likewise, the music on Borders suggests a comparable sense of catching finite slivers within a greater pool of endlessness. With a bandname derived from the mathematical term for “a set of elements containing nothing,” it’s no surprise that Emptyset aim to bring a sense of physicality to empty space—or, as Ginzburg once put it, to identify the “thingness” at the heart of an empty void. When it comes excavating brutality out of silence, Emptyset sit in a class by themselves.
The album even comes close to tunefulness on “Dissolve,” where an unidentifiable sound source takes on the character of delicate guitar strumming. And though you'd never mistake Emptyset for dance music, theirs is still body music, in a way. One can only imagine that listening to Borders with a heavy-duty subwoofer would be a punishing affair. Similarly, even without one iota of percussion—Borders contains nothing by way of a traditional “beat”—the groove is undeniable. And the new material, perhaps more than ever, harbors ample evidence for why Emptyset continue to identify as a techno act, albeit one whose style hews much closer to Berlin than Detroit. Given their Bristol background, it makes sense that Purgas and Ginzburg see their work as an extension of sound system/DJ culture.
In truth, Emptyset haven’t evolved all that much since they began working in the full-length format in 2009. A microcosm of their overall progression, Borders essentially hovers in one mood, requires effort to recognize its contours, and ends on an anti-climactic note as the music simply ceases, without any sense of completion or finality. And whether it loses or gains flavor over multiple listens depends on the listener’s patience threshold for repetition. But by turning up the volume and menace this time, Emptyset manage to put new spins on dubstep and industrial—genres they don’t explicitly reference—as well. As such, Borders functions as a gateway between traditionalist dance forms and the artier end of the electronic-production universe. It also offers new ways of understanding both by reflecting each against the other.
