Shackleton at MUD at the Twisted Pepper on July 22nd 2011
Review: Liam Cagney
Photos: Kate Turner
Last Friday night saw a welcome return to Irish shores by UK-born, Germany-based electronic music producer Shackleton.
Since his first visit to Ireland a few years ago – for the (now-defunct) Mantua Festival in County Roscommon – Shackleton’s profile has become more prominent. So far this year he’s both appeared on the cover of The Wire magazine and been the subject of a well-received release in the Fabric Live series.
Although often lumped in with artists like Digital Mystikz and Skream in the dubstep bracket, Shackleton’s music isn’t too adherently stuck with dubstep’s generic glue. As was apparent from early on in the cover artwork of Shackleton and Appleblim’s Skull Disco label – an iconography more characteristic of punk than electronic music – this music diverges from dubstep to the very same degree as it converges with it.
Shackleton’s soundworld has disparate sources. Arabic chant, West-African percussion, spoken word samples from late-night TV, blaring sirens, dissonant harmonies, and echoing crackles and whooshes all vie for the listener’s ear. It’s a potpourri well suited to Shackleton’s current home base: Berlin, and more specifically Berlin’s Turkish (and free-improv) district of Neukölln.
As I stood in the ground floor bar of the Twisted Pepper venue before the gig, my earshot aped what was to come. Music bled from three different sources – the upstairs Loft, the ground floor Stage, and the underground Basement – filling the space of the bar, tying in shifting patterns a ragged acoustic knot.
Shackleton, appropriately enough, went onstage in the Basement. While some music is made for sunshine, or for a stage with flashing lights, this is not it: Shackleton is of the stratum of the subterranean and the hard-to-see. For most of his set the dancefloor was cast in pitch darkness.
That dancefloor filled as the set started with samples of thunder and Chinese-sounding marimba scales. The sound became more dense and intensified over the course of a slow crescendo until sirens were screaming from the speakers. Then the bass dropped and the beats fell in.
I was expecting a set more or less along the lines of the Fabric 55 mix (which is not really a DJ mix but a laptop jam on Shackleton’s own music). And while there were some crossover points, much of this material was new and fresh.
The experience of hearing this music live is much different from listening to it on headphones or on a home stereo. In a live setting, coming out of a huge PA system, this is all about the bass – an experience more visceral than cerebral.
One of the thoughts that arose over the hour and a half of this subsonic bass attack – which managed to reorganise the relation between your bones, ears, eyeballs, and teeth – is what this bass obsessiveness represents: fetishistic fixation, structural organisation, or the search for a new I-IV-V?
Some of the answer lies in the bass’s level being at the limit of audibility – and so at the limit of music. Together with the aural fragmentation of the music’s sample-strewn surface texture, the last- outpost bass levels mark this out as music that is all about the exploration of acoustic limits.