Sometimes versatility is an end in itself—you make different kinds of music because you want to, and because you can. But versatility can also be a side effect, an accidental byproduct of the process of honing in on your own sound.
In his short but prolific career so far, Charles McCloud Duff has tried his hand at many sounds. As part of the club duo 5kinAndBone5, he produced the rapper Le1f's saucy, sax-driven "Wut". In the duo Amen Brother, with his frequent recording partner Vin Sol, he flirted briefly with B-more breaks and ghetto-house. An early track under his Matrixxman alias, "Wicked", laced dreamy synths with snapping percussion; not long thereafter, Matrixxman's "God Created the Beat", featuring Mykki Blanco, took a stab at ballroom house. As he's experimented with different variations on the deeper strains of house and techno, his own signature has begun to emerge. Matrixxman's productions are typically marked by their restraint (even when they bang); their pristine sound design (except when they're murky); their balance (except when they go off the deep end).
His debut album, Homesick, displays a newfound and dogged single-mindedness. It is so intently focused upon its aesthetic—dark, ominous, sensually mechanical, all hot breath and brushed stainless steel—that it feels, in retrospect, like everything until now has been leading up to this. He has arrived at an effortlessly efficient vision of techno, chilly and not a little forbidding: no bullshit, no wasted movements. Duff told Resident Advisor that he was attracted to drum 'n' bass, his first electronic love, because "there was this alienating feeling I was really drawn to. It was post-apocalyptic." You can hear that fascination for the inhuman, or the post-human, all over Homesick. There are no voices, no acoustic instruments, no obvious samples, just analog pulses and electric currents.
The bulk of the album tackles classic techno styles and tropes: The plucky arpeggios of "Network Failure" and "False Pattern Recognition" recall Robert Hood's nail-bitten minimalism; "Red Light District" is squelchy acid; "Augmented" is EBM tinted with tropical watercolors. Some of the most invigorating cuts are essentially just drum tracks fleshed out with a modicum of silvery tone, but half of Homesick takes place away from the dancefloor. "Annika's Theme" evokes Blade Runner with new age choral pads and a wistful melody; "Packard Plant", titled in homage to a Detroit landmark, cobbles Motor City tropes together into a kind of deconstructed techno. It's all smartly sequenced, right down to "Dejected", a minute-and-a-half-long metal drone that serves as a kind of dystopian palate-cleanser, and even the club-oriented tracks have the home listener in mind. For the most part, they're short, intense mood pieces, and they inform one another in the same way that paintings in a gallery seem to communicate with each other, sparking new meanings as the viewer's gaze crisscrosses the white cube.
Homesick is not quite a concept album, but there's a ghost of a narrative visible in the record's bookending tracks. First, there's "Necronomicon", which opens the LP with nine-and-a-half minutes of greyscale throb, like Basic Channel rendered ultra-minimal and unusually menacing. (That's the record's longest track, by a considerable margin, which is kind of impressive; it takes some chutzpah to open an album with something this forbidding.) The closing "Earth Like Conditions", sounds almost optimistic, with its kosmische echoes and its green shoots of melody. If the bulk of the album tends to evoke a metal object hurtling through empty space, "Earth Like Conditions" feels like an escape pod to another world—or, at least, to Matrixxman's next record, where, one suspects, he'll have distilled his sound into an even more potent, concentrated form.
