Loader Mither is the debut album from Vester Koza, marking two years of silence since his Houndstooth debut OTR, an EP that followed on from an incredibly strong run of digital drops for Maslo. Very much indebted to, yet never leaning too heavily on the Warped electronica of AFX, BOC and Ae. Loader Mither is sure to sit alongside recent LPs from Proc Fiskal, North Sea Dialect and Objekt as one of 2018s most defining glances of outer-edged future club music...
Opening with the slow bubble chords and well placed Janet Jackson 'In Complete Darkness We Are All The Same...' sample, Vester Koza instantly takes us back into his world, one where the spectres of 90's electronica do roam free, Vester Koza makes sure that you don't mistake this as a pastiche of the arguably golden age of electronica, but a collage that takes influence from this fertile period while morphing in new dimensions that fix in with both his artistic and Houndstooth's strong musical vision. By the time we land at 'met her in the backsies' things takes a sharp turn toward the sort of industrial romance that made Caustic Window such a heart-shredding prospect, the glowing pads providing light relief from the bristling breakbeats and crunched drum patterns. Elsewhere, 'arthur two sheds' squashes footwork down into the most gel-like dub techno levels this side of Vainqueur. While the brilliantly titled 'my well crap car (mardy mix)' shows that he has both a stylistic sensibility and a sense of humour, all the while accelerating things up toward some gothic Feed Me Weird Things atmospherics, the glassy breakbeats roll with all the sort of slumped back force of liquid DNB being composed out on a sequencer whose batteries have almost ran out.
Loader Mither is seemingly both a self-explanatory story (reading between and the actual track titles) but also a properly great rave-tinged record, rich with the sort of humour that made acts like Altern-8 such an exciting prospect, yet it's a true advancement on the sort of armchair techno, that when tinted with the very best elements of Northern hardcore and rave morphs into bold new shapes. When it's over you feel like you have truly been on a proper journey, yet like the very best albums, it's one where the ride will stick in your head longer than the endpoint reached.
