At the end of last year, a new high-speed train started running from Bristol to London. Touted as a win for commuters and the environment, it also piqued the interest of the real estate market, which is rarely good news for renters—some of whom are the artists that gave Bristol its appeal in the first place. The two cities have long been linked; historically by the long shadow of British colonialism, and culturally by a shared heritage of black British music. While their music scenes are indebted to much of the same sonic DNA—most notably, Jamaican soundsystem culture—having some distance from the bright lights of London allowed something different to sprout in the West Country. From trip-hop to purple to UK techno permutations that imagine new journeys between the U.S., the Caribbean, and the UK, Bristol has long been on its own wave.
Otik grew up in Bristol but now lives in London. Over the past six years, he’s put out a string of 12"s and EPs that each dip into a different facet, and era, of the music that grew from the seeds sown by dancehall soundsystems: jungle, UK garage, grime, dub techno. His new four-track release, Thousand Year Stare, is both a culmination of his stylistic exploration and a break from that pattern. While it was clearly designed with dancefloor dimensions in mind, what lifts the record up out of solely DJ tool territory is the storytelling detail that headphones illuminate.
The sound design of the EP’s title track—moving water, birdcall, and expansive effects like echo and reverb—sensually describes a bodily experience of standing in nature. There’s an all-back-to-mine ambient-house spirit to the song, one that speaks to dancing as a form of meditation. The name of the track remixes a phrase that describes the dissociative stare of a person with extreme trauma.
Where “Thousand Year Stare” created an endless horizon, “Antihero” is awash with a sense of towering dread. The eerie techno track’s central see-sawing creak of a synth line evokes the claustrophobia of a cornfield, something that decades of horror movies have amped up. In comparison, “Ghost Mole” plays on ideas of interiors. The bass, drums, and digital percussion—including what might be pitched-up rave whistles—sound like they are bouncing off the plastic and concrete surfaces of a built environment. Around the halfway mark, the treatment of the bass and the higher frequencies suggests a second interior: the one inside your own chest. These augmented sounds call to mind rushing air and pounding blood.
If the rest of the EP speaks to a sense of physicality, the final track, “Means Nothing,” performs an act of transcendence. Folding dream-state dancehall energy into the sunrise moment of a rave set, it takes interiority to its ultimate conclusion. Otik has called Burial, an artist whose music is closely associated with the wandering-wondering experience of traversing London by night bus, his “all-time favourite musician.” Thousand Year Stare does not sound like Burial, but it does paint a picture of a Bristol producer coming into his psychogeographic powers.
