"The intelligence resides in the work, not the individual," explains Kerry Leimer in the liner notes to Artificial Dance, a retrospective collection that highlights the unpredictable alchemy of his early 1980s studio project Savant. The Seattle experimentalist is best known for the woozy ambient music he has released as K. Leimer, but Savant’s approach was something like an avant-garde jam band re-imagined as musique concrète. Riffs, grooves, and rhythms were crafted on a wide array of instruments—electric bass, drums, Oberheim DMX, Prophet 5 synthesizer, and objects identified in the credits with names like "Percussion (Wood, Silver, Plastic)," "Guitar (Prepared, China)," and "Guitar (Cloud Guitars)"—and then broken apart, looped, layered, run through primitive effects, and reassembled at last by the razor-wielding producer across lengthy spools of reel-to-reel tape.
The recombinant approach had something in common with Brian Eno’s work during the period, particularly his David Byrne collaboration My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (Eno, too, was fond of fanciful instruments like “snake guitar”), and the results similarly hovered somewhere between funk, loosely speaking, and more abstracted forms of ambient sound. Debut single "Stationary Dance", with its breakbeat structure and a voiceover sampled from an instructional LP, anticipated cut-and-paste artists like M|A|R|R|S and Coldcut by six or seven years, while the watery B-side, "Sensible Music", sounds today like a more muscular, lo-fi version of Talk Talk’s later work. Listeners familiar with Leimer’s solo catalog will detect echoes of that music here: the glassy synthesizers of his ambient recordings trace serpentine paths through Savant’s songs, and the rolling, otherworldly drum programming of K. Leimer’s 1983 album Imposed Order bleeds through into the stop-start rhythms of "The Neo-Realist" and "Indifference".
But the bulk of Savant’s catalog sounds like nothing else that had come before. These tracks, where skeletal dub rhythms underpin an array of daubed-on splotches of electric bass and Clavinet and atonal guitar, feel less like "songs" than amorphous organisms where a rippling pulse is the only constant. The structure can be hard to follow but in a fascinating way—long and convoluted 10-bar phrases are not uncommon, and it often feels like a rug is being pulled out from under you, even when the bassline plunges deep in the pocket. "Shadow in Deceit" begins with a flurry of bells and post-punk bass and gradually transforms, via interlocking marimbas, into a vivid template for Four Tet’s brand of new-age techno. "Heart of Stillness", with its unsteady pitter-patter percussion and dripping guitar tones, has an even headier rainforest vibe; it feels like sound just on the cusp of coalescing into music, or perhaps vice versa.
Given that the bulk of the album’s tracks were made between 1981 and 1985, it’s harder to judge the final three cuts, all previously unreleased, which date from between 2009 and 2014. "Facility" is dark and alluring, and it’s not hard to imagine it appearing on a contemporary label like R&S. But the context differs so radically from the early work that the later songs might as well constitute a different project altogether. But that’s OK—the 11 songs that comprise Savant’s prime output amount to some of the most striking and original American electronic music of that period, so much so that it seems almost inconceivable that it went largely overlooked until now. Had a tastemaker like Detroit’s Electrifying Mojo gotten his hands on Savant’s slim catalog, who knows how things might have turned out. Artificial Dance is enough to make you rethink what you thought you knew about that era—and to make you wonder what else might be out there, just waiting to be rediscovered.
