At 6:30 a.m. on August 8th, Jack Dunning-- a producer and DJ who goes by Untold-- tweeted, "Chirpy Heathrow passport officer: 'that was a short holiday' me 'I was djing' him 'what sort of stuff do you play?' me 'I dont know anymore.'"
Dunning has released six singles in the past two years, all sparse and aggressive, all tough to categorize. I always feel like I'm tiptoeing past sleeping parents when I write about dance music, which is one of the reasons I've come to love his singles-- it's easy to imagine people who really like dance music feeling slightly confused by them, too.
Part of what makes his records hard to predict is that they draw on styles that don't usually end up together. There's no real regard for historical consistency, either-- something from the 80s bashes up against something contemporary before being swept away by something they'll play on the mothership after the flood. His tracks sound full in scope, but never cluttered-- most of them have only three or four things going on at any one time. That's part of his talent: He balances fluency with austerity; he knows which details bring depth and which distract.
The other part of what makes his records hard to predict is that he beats half his sounds unrecognizable. The combination-- a cut-up sense of history mixed with self-conscious innovation, at least on a level of sound design-- makes for tracks that are uniquely dissonant. (It's also inspired a lot of silly efforts on my part to try and verbalize what these sounds do: they suck themselves in, they flip, they fizzle and smoke, they're coming from inside the house, etc.)
Gonna Work Out Fine, a new EP of six tracks, is the longest and most abrasive set he's put out yet. The minimalism in his style comes off as hyperconfidence-- about half the time, he leaves the work of the kick drum to percussive bass sounds ("drums are for pussies," he tweeted in June). There are no ballads or showy climaxes. The atmosphere is tense and claustrophobic, but there's always an element that lets a little steam out-- on "Gonna Work Out Fine", it's a corny record-scratch sound effect; on "Stop What You're Doing" (whose remix, by James Blake, was one of my favorite tracks of the year) it's a set of big, airy chords that unexpectedly wash over the mix and then vanish. Dunning self-identifies as a dubstep producer, but his music doesn't feel like it's pushing dubstep forward as much as exploding it.
If you haven't inferred the caveat that this is hardcore dance music, well: this is hardcore dance music. But if you read this website, you-- the hypothetically curious listener-- are accustomed to recommendations of Ethiopian Jazz and doom-metal, so I don't know why Untold would seem especially foreign. Whether Untold "has something to offer a community of listeners outside the dance music world" or some other such BS, I'm not sure-- at this point, I'm probably too interested in some contemporary dance music to say.
Then again, it's records like Dunning's-- and everything he's released on his Hemlock label, and the new directions of now-older labels like Hyperdub, and the varied post-dubstep sounds of guys like Mount Kimbie or Joy Orbison-- that have made me interested to begin with. In a recent interview with Resident Advisor, Dunning said, "At the moment, I want to make people screwface, shout, dance weird." It's not his most well-articulated thought, but it's probably most representative of his music-- broken and fragmented, loud and clear.
