The 21st century of electronic music has seen artists in pursuit of increasingly physical and viscerally layered sound design, and Blawan is one of this mission’s tireless leaders. Since his debut album Wet Will Always Dry dropped in 2018, the question of a full length followup has always loomed on the horizon, anticipation growing as each passing year brought an EP with newly contorted sonics. The move from techno and his Ternesc label to XL Recordings found him experimenting with vocal distortion and ever more abstract sonics, and his long awaited second album SickElixir contains some of his most alien work to date.
So corrosively manipulated are these productions that it can be difficult to discern exactly what it is you’re hearing at times, almost like a dream but certainly not the woozy hypnagogic kind: SickElixir is the musical equivalent of smelling salts, immediately rendering listeners bolt upright and alert, and testing the senses with its hyperventilating range of audio attacks. The opening track plays like a rave in an airplane turbine with grimy metallic vocals and an absolutely caustic, shredded bass that defies belief, leading to the exaggerated contrast between whispered verses and pulverising walls of synth detritus on ‘NOS’.
The characteristics of UK bass, hard drum, and electro hide beneath the scuzziness of this album, but you’ll need a pressure washer from the school of power electronics to peel back the layers of serious ruckus texturing each mutant drum line and nasty dubstep bass scrub. Vocals are totally liquid and guttural, exclaiming “I’m in the rabbithole” and “Gussshhh” before transforming into squelchy vocoders and didgeridoo timbres. Frequency shifting power drills bore into menacingly slow whisper raps, tyres swerve and automatons stomp into the black of night, and clobbering rhythms accelerate and chop up everything into thinner and sharper slices, all the while there’s a buzzing that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up like a wasp has just flown by.
That’s the power of Blawan’s sonics on SickElixir: ultra physical sounds inducing emphatic physical responses, most often in the form of screwfacing at just how good it is.
