Shackleton is incredibly prolific. He follows last fall's surprising dubstep throwback collaboration with Pinch with a massive offering on his own Woe to the Septic Heart label. Available either as an impressive (and pricey) vinyl box set or as 2xCD compilation, Music for the Quiet Hour / The Drawbar Organ EPs sees Shackleton sink even further into grotesque dub madness. It's the work of an experimental composer more so than a dance producer, as this release (especially the macabre pit that is Music for the Quiet Hour) shares headspace with British masters of spleen like Nurse With Wound and Coil.
The volume of material here, clocking in at an intimidating 137 minutes, isn't problematic: Shackleton neatly separates (relatively) shorter rhythmic pieces (The Drawbar Organ EPs) and epic apocalyptic screeds (Quiet Hour). He's said it can take months to properly layer his complex rhythmic patterns, and his trademark drum programming is on display on The Drawbar Organ. He's still mining drum sounds from Asia and Africa, so his pinging, pointillist attacks contain a harmonic complexity unavailable to gated snares and wump-wump kickdrums. On tracks like "Test Tubes" and "Wish You Better", this creates a crawling, organic sense of motion not unlike watching beetles scurry over one another. And like an insect colony, Drawbar Organ feels governed by maths that we're not privy to but are nonetheless fascinating to behold.
Melodically, Drawbar Organ is Shackleton's strongest work. Throughout he borrows more than dub reggae's ghostly reverb; he also nabs its dark spirituality and the soft, reedy tones of the melodica. Cut-up choirs speckle the record, and electric pianos and (duh) organs also feature heavily. They turn "Katyusha" into a roiling, acid-damaged burner. "Seven Present Tenses" is unholy worship, while "(For the) Love of Weeping" is quick and lucid. Syncopated basslines stalk the tracks like housecats.
Drawbar Organ is a welcome expansion of the gray, minimal Three EPs (Shackleton's last solo full-length release), but it's Music for the Quiet Hour where his delirium shines. Just five tracks-- two of which are seven-minute bookends-- Quiet Hour welcomes back estranged collaborator Vengeance Tenfold, a spoken-word artist who who helps strangle Shackleton's most distended productions to date. (Tenfold is less laughably predictable than Kode9's partner-in-misanthropy, Spaceape, but your enjoyment will correlate strongly with your fondness for garden-variety Revelations-style soothsayin'.) The queasy, unnerving passages are stitched together like an 18th-century surgery victim, surpassing last month's Congos/Sun Araw collaboration as the most avant-garde dub expedition this year. The 21-minute centerpiece, "Music for the Quiet Hour Part 4", patters indecisively before a long vocal passage-- a grandfather dictating a letter to his grandson, Shackleton's most alluring spoken-word choice yet-- ushers the track into extended ambience, finding the midway point between Robert Ashley and Digital Mystikz.
Quiet Hour is the immersion experience that Shackleton has been building toward for years, an album that isn't just "not really dance music"-- like many of his productions-- but one that aligns him with avant-garde composers as well as other, less-mannered freakniks. Shackleton lives in Berlin, now, but he's a UK transplant, one that obviously still shares that country's long-held fascination with dub. Drawbar Organ / Quiet Hour takes that fascination and grinds it in the back molars, spitting out something lumpy, infirm, and wonderfully transformed.
