“If an artist is ever going to carve out a new territory their work needs to be different at the seed-level, different before the start.” This statement from New Zealand’s Olly Peryman touches on one of the most interesting aspects of his work: its provenance. From one perspective, Peryman’s music as Fis is an offshoot of the contemporary drum and bass scene, taking up a set of propositions set out by dBridge and Instra:mental’s Autonomic project at the turn of the decade and coming back with fascinatingly illogical conclusions. From another, Peryman is a singular figure whose avant-garde rhythmic constructs have converged only briefly with a wider movement.
Peryman’s activities so far have lent weight to the former theory. Discovered after handing a CD to the boss of New Zealand’s bastion of innovative drum and bass, Samurai Records, the producer has since released music on Samurai’s experimental sublabel, Horo, and dBridge’s Exit Records. His work tends to occupy the 170bpm tempo range common to the style, and explores, however obscurely, the same highly poised interzone between frenetic doubletime and its halftime counterpart. Often, too, his claustrophobic grooves bear traces of the DnB’s well-worn signifiers: the clipped snarl of a Reese bass, submerged echoes of ragga rudeness.
But the recent Homologous EP felt like Peryman was in the process of uncovering an altogether new rhythmic grammar. The producer has long ignored the quantizing function of his music software, preferring to work off-grid; lately, he says, his rhythms have been drawn from “what I hear and see from my body during meditation.” Appearing through Void Coms—a new label in which Peryman has a hand—and accompanied by an Yves Klein-derived manifesto about achieving a state that is “void of worldly influences,” the EP was still distinctively, inimitably FIS—but it was difficult to claim any link to drum and bass.
The appearance of Peryman’s latest, the Preparations EP, through Brooklyn label Tri Angle, further complicates matters. Suddenly it’s tempting to hear parallels with the darker fringes of the label’s trans-genre roster: Vessel’s scorched techno perhaps, or Howse’s dreamy footwork abstractions. Certainly, there is a forlorn melodicism to some of Peryman’s music which may initially have caught label head Robin Carolan’s ear—although it’s only a fleeting presence on the Preparations EP.
In fact, this EP hinges around a rather old FIS production, and one that finds him at his most conventional. "DMT Usher", which received a vinyl-only release through Samurai Horo in 2012, is Peryman’s equivalent of a crowd pleaser, centred around a single downsliding bass tone that sputters and wheezes like a damaged strimmer. As always with a FIS production, the thrill is in the small things: the uncanny weft of the sounds, the micro-rhythmic push and pull of the percussion. But, arranged according to fairly rote build-and-drop dynamics, the track isn’t his most thrilling work.
Better is "Mildew Swoosh", which pushes that halftime-doubletime dichotomy to a breaking point: pulling one way is the scrabbling insectoid percussion and scintillating synth arp; against them, drifting, somnolent pads. But Peryman really thrives when he explores greater extremes of abstraction. "Magister Nunns" and "CE Visions" are ominous beasts, their grooves buried, protean, and beset by spumes of cavernous reverb. The former, in particular, seems to crumble as it hits the air, as if we’re hearing Disintegration Loops-style tape degradation in time lapse. It makes for an exhausting listen, but since when was starting from scratch easy?
