For whatever reason, the Berlin-based, British avant-garde electronic music producer Steve Warwick seems to get an outsized amount of Haterade poured on the experimental music he releases as Heatsick. On Twitter, he’s suffered slings and arrows from both the senior editor of a major music site and an obscure beatmaker alike, which seems strange given he’s released primarily a string of cassettes and CDRs in microscopic editions before releasing a proper debut on the PAN label in 2011. But with Warwick’s chintzy synths deployed for live performance—not to mention his glasses and his shirt tucked-into his khakis—perhaps it’s simply a matter of high school bullying the geekiest kid in the classroom carrying over into adulthood.
For his second PAN release, Re-Engineering, Warwick draws on a wide range of influences, be it his own art exhibition at the Kinderhook & Caracas gallery in Berlin, avant-garde dance music, or an overheard snippet of a street busker belting out an Oasis cover on public transport. The opening title track “Re-Engineering” takes a stomping beat, dilutes it with a watery keyboard line and then introduces a vocal from fellow multi-disiplinary artist Hanne Lippard. In her chilliest voice, Lippard recites text featured in Warwick’s aforementioned exhibit, a cluster of catchphrases ranging from “Gay Google” to “A poem is a machine made of words” to the Darby Crash adage “What we do is secret,” the cumulative effect feeling nonsensical or that meaning could only be gleaned were you to have been at the opening.
“E-Scape” uses warped undulating keyboard lines to mesmeric effect, sounding not wholly dissimilar to Pac-Man in Ouroboros mode. The third track, “Mimosa", also accentuates the cheap textures of Warwick’s synthesizers, adds in some saxophone warbles and subliminal murmurs, looping it all so that it drifts into something kin to African composer Francis Bebey’s whimsical electronic explorations. Both are low-key but charming.
Intellectually sophisticated but prone to using primitive musical effects to convey such messages, Warwick’s results vary wildly after that. Balancing between the two extremes is a hard trick, one that even the most garlanded producers have trouble maintaining, be they Matmos, Terre Thaemlitz or Matthew Herbert. (This writer would also contend that the Knife was better served hinting at queer theory circa Silent Shout rather than being overt on this year’s Shaking the Habitual.) A samba guitar powers “Watermark",” but again Lippard’s vocals act as simulacra of a voiceover on promo CDs. “Speculative” features the sort of driving beat, finger snap, stand-up bassline, closed hi-hat ticks and echoing cello combination that reminds me of many thrilling Arthur Russell dance sides, but the vocals of Jesse Garcia --plainspoken and dry like Russell’s own vocal delivery—favors multisyllabic and verbose mots like “gelatinous” “bifurcation” and “congealing” undercutting what’s otherwise a decent dancefloor track.
Not that one should expect ecstatic vocal house from the Heatsick project, but almost whenever vocals do appear on the album, they distract rather than serve the track in question. Only on the playful thump of “Dial Again", again using Garcia’s vocals in a far more campy setting, does the vocal elevate the track, as here the line recalls many an early Italo and house track. Were the beats stronger elsewhere, it would even out, but even on something with a propulsive beat like “Clear Chanel", that pulse gets buried in iridescent synth layers to where only the snare really gets through. But on standouts like the gurgling “Après-Moi, Le Déluge!” and the acid-tinged pistoning of “Emerge,” Heatsick shows that he can craft smart yet sinuous tracks that can make both lovers and haters move.
