Tassid, A.P. & Josh Inc – Impact UK 001 (Impact UK)

Impact UK is a new techno label from A.P. – and would you look at that? The last three reviews on here have been predominantly acid producers making techno cuts. Could there be something in the air?

Tassid’s Pest Infest (148 BPM) is typically fast and has a grotty bassline underpinning a filthy kick and marvellous, clattery percussion, like an orchestra of demonic children thrashing away at dustbin lids. A vocal gives way to itchy, agitated riffage and the end result is glorious filth of the first order. Highly recommended. Suck My Stomp Box (144 BPM), meanwhile, is pure metallic funk, thundering away like an explosion at an oil refinery. My absolute favourite, however, is Toilet Pervert (145 BPM). Here, liquid drums are almost perfectly weighted, then come ravey horns, which are soon stretched and mutated into cackling, leering shapes, speeded up and slowed down. Here is a place where sounds start as one thing then end up another, creeping in and out of a mix that’s gratifyingly busy and full of little tweaks and events, but not overloaded, while a vocal sample from Gil Scott Heron’s The Revolution Will Not Be Televised adds texture and also some unexpected gravitas. How it ended up with the title Toilet Pervert is one only A.P. and Josh Inc. can answer, but it’s an ace tune, and fully deserving of this, horror queen, Linnea Quigley with a chainsaw.

Get it from: 909

Silex – Twisted Turmoil EP (Anecdote)

Silex is the new project from Fil Devious and Justin E, who together have been mining a love of horror movies and techno riffery for this debut EP, a more sinister, and snarling thing you couldn’t hope to find.

Coulrophobia, (145 BPM) then. No, I didn’t know what it meant either. The fear of clowns apparently: their cadaverous white faces, the painted-on grin that hides what they’re really thinking, which is that they want to skin you alive then stuff your body into the crawlspace. Accordingly, the Silex take opens with a clean kick, like the insistent drip-drip of an underground pool, but then comes a nasty, bubbling bassline, and then a set of chords that stare at you red-eyed from inside a storm drain. It hits its groove and stays there, dark, but without resorting to the industrial sound that’s getting a bit wearing elsewhere, intense and subtly layered. Fluff Buzz (143 BPM) is just as good. Coulrophobia’s sci-fi twin, it blasts away with trippy, swirling effects and nagging melodies, while Touch Tone Trip (145 BPM) breaks out a sample from The Thing halfway through and teases you with a ghostly 303 that might not even be there. Superb stuff.

Get it from: Juno