Low Jack (aka Philippe Hallais) is one of the more exciting producers to emerge from the experimental techno community clustered around Parisian labels like In Paradisum and L.I.E.S., a New York transplant. To take rudimentary machine beats and attack them with scouring pads is neither new nor even particularly interesting in and of itself, but what distinguishes Low Jack's work is the way he seems to be groping his way towards his own musical language, one beyond the limits of either noise or techno as conventionally rendered. On his debut album, last year's Garifuna Variations, he twisted archival recordings of Central America's Garifuna people into grimy knots as part of a commission from Paris' Quai Branley Museum. Cut loose from the conceptual framework and institutional ties, Sewing Machine is a far freer album, and a lot more fun.
Most of the tracks here play out pretty much the same way: fire up the drum machine, run it through a mazelike signal path, and twist at the knobs until the air itself seems to bleed. Of all the people making distorted techno right now (Kyle Hall, Delroy Edwards, Florian Kupfer), few make their noise sing quite as expressively as Low Jack. It's impressive how much mileage he gets from a simple distorted bass drum. On each track, it's treated in a slightly different way, so that it has a different color and shape—round here, lumpy there, and over there, pocked with metal studs. In the turgid "Fubu Knight", through some arcane feat of audio sculpting, the snare drum sounds almost like a drawn-out scream. On the headbanging "Sweatpants Chick", probably the most unabashedly lunkheaded thing here right down to the title, he plays his filter's resonance knob like an instrument, wringing the approximation of a melody out of its swoops and shrieks. The filter also takes center stage on "Zaltan's Jackets"; this time it quacks like Donald Duck, strutting and squelching in between medicine-ball-sized kick drums.
Not a lot of daylight typically makes it onto a Low Jack production, and that's particularly true of Sewing Machine; he might just as well have called it 50 Words for Coal. "Pocket Pussy" begins with a squall of sooty white noise that's even uglier than the introductory track, which is an 87-second blast that sounds like a gurgle from the bowels of hell. But stick with it, and Hallais begins to show his handiwork. A minute in, kick drums come bursting through the murk followed by blotchy bass frequencies, and then the high-end chatter descends, alien and insistent. Fading out over a rhythm that might be sharpening knives, the six-minute track has the dramatic arc of a radio play—not bad for something made with little more than a drum machine and fuzzbox. Sewing Machine certainly isn't for everyone, but for listeners who like their noise as expressive as it is brutal, this slim album speaks volumes.
