With the release of his 2011 debut LP GLAQJO XAACSSO, and the obligatory round of introductory interviews that followed, Londoner patten decided to do things a little differently. A Dummy interview showed him to be unafraid of tackling the big questions—What is music? How can we truly know ourselves?—while he repeatedly turned the tables on the interviewer, probing him for his views on the album, interrogating his language, and praising him when he asked a good question. In a Dazed interview from around the same time, meanwhile, the producer’s responses to the boilerplate questions came in the form of links to a jumble of abstruse Wikipedia pages—on exergy, the Hum, the finer points of 5th century Sanskrit linguistic theory, and so on.
All of this points to a personality type that, if not entirely birthed by the web, certainly seems to be in plentiful supply in the internet age; a personality type that shone through on the album itself, too. Many comparisons were made between GLAQJO XAACSSO and golden era Warp, and though patten’s reference points were mostly contemporary—up-to-date strains of hip-hop, house, and techno—he displayed a similar urge to push the parameters of these styles to the edge of chaos, perpetually striving for greater density, volume, abstraction. (He has also spoken about trying to work “in a subliminal state between waking and sleeping,” echoing Aphex Twin’s notorious sleep deprivation method). The resultant music was fascinating and often highly inventive. But it could sometimes feel like the sheer intensity of it all was concealing a basic paucity of material—that, as with those Wiki links, what we were dealing with was a diverting but rather shallow engagement with the subject matter at hand.
Perhaps it’s just that patten’s music doesn’t benefit from prolonged exposure. Certainly, condensed into 23 minutes on the EOLIAN INSTATE EP, the producer’s signature style is far more palatable. The tracks on this, his debut release for Warp, are a touch more incisive, although in other respects it seems that little has changed for patten in the past two years. The sound remains much the same—a pulverised form of electronica tempered with a subtle melodic glow—and passing comparisons can still be made to Actress’ heat-warped techno, or Flying Lotus at his most fervidly psychedelic.
In places the familiarity is welcome. Opener "Aviary" starts out near-impossibly dense and heads upwards from there, patten piling on ever more layers of gauzy texturing. "Obsidian Alms (mid-saccade)", a bracingly abstract take on warehouse techno, pushes this logic even further. But elsewhere it becomes clear that, in spite of its brevity, this is not an all-killer package. There’s pleasure to be found in the subtleties of "Towards infinite shores", but as a whole the thing feels rather desultory. And "oea/Catalogue"'s steady accrual of material begins to feel workaday after about minute four, in spite of the peppy surface edits.
Fortunately, the loping "Sixth seven" shows that patten has a few new tricks up his sleeve. In this case it’s stripping things back. Given space to breathe, the vivid strangeness of each layer of material, and the way in which they fit together to form a single skewed mechanism, becomes all the clearer. Perhaps patten is learning, finally, that everything-all-the-time isn’t the only way to go*.*
