Ren Schofield tips his hat to bolshy ’90s MTV rock on ‘YACKER’, reshaping his technoid machine loops into playful, gunked-up, gakked-out belters. Long sleeved tee-shirt mandatory – somewhere between Pan Sonic and Lightning Bolt.
‘YACKER’ feels like the album Schofield was always destined to make. Even on his earliest records, the producer – who hails from free-noise petri dish Rhode Island – might have absorbed the aesthetics of minimal techno, but his roots were tangled with basement rock and scuzzy power electronics. His notorious appearance at Berghain, where he played brief tracks live and left spaces in-between, eschewing the expected continuous power minimal roll, was a taste of things to come. Schofield was never really making techno, he was using its language to devise a tongue-in-cheek splatter of grungy electronics that owed more to Providence or Ann Arbor than it did to Detroit or Berlin.
It’s all made crystal clear on the aptly-titled ‘ABRASION’, a thunderous glam-punk rattle of waxy, live-sounding drums and drill bit synths that moves like techno in hypnotic, whirring phrases, but roars like sloppy hardcore punk. Turning his gear up until each sound almost disintegrates, Schofield approximates a band – even the synthetic feedback that bookends the track is a sly wink – but doesn’t sound like he’s marinating in listless nostalgia. He’s capturing the lightning-in-a-bottle energy of an era (mid ’90s?) when rock and dance music were largely sequestered; the bands that did manage to cross borders often missed the point, or spiraled into raked-over EBM territory. Schofield brings back the frosted tips and wraparound shades, but none of the gear fear, replacing the guitar, bass and drums with tatty grey boxes and hotwired FX pedals.
The sheer momentum here is magnetic – on tracks like ‘SPRAY’ and ‘CONE’ he dots snares and rides around wormy, distorted synths, sidestepping techno convention and leaning into sweet excess, breaking every few bars for the all-important drum roll. This is territory that’s been approached before – think Shit and Shine or even Black Dice – but Schofield works with such a shrug to the expected formula and such rigorous attention to detail that it feels like he’s hit a high water mark. On the speedy ‘AERATOR’, he even starts to graze DJ Diaki territory, using bubbly, scalding electronics to counter his scattershot, hollowed-out drums. It’s party music that’s been precision engineered to inject adrenaline into the inky main vein of the grimdark experimental landscape – fair play, actually.
