Bleep

Pressure, the imprint run by Kevin Martin (The Bug), had a busy debut year back in 2018. Releases from the likes of Miss Red, G36 and Martin’s own Flame 1 collaboration with Burial made good on the high hopes we had for his latest venture. After resting up throughout the first half of the new year, Pressure’s first drop of 2019 sees Martin procure the services of his old pal Justin Broadrick (Godflesh, Jesu).

Broadrick’s latest EP as JK Flesh is another set of broiling, brutal electronics. In Your Pit sounds as if it has been rent screaming from its tomb and set loose on a dark, stormy night. Razor-edged synths writhe and sputter over booming drums; huge groundswells of bass slither uneasily in the subs; the clouds of noise that hang over cuts like ‘Paranoid Archetype’ sound like a choir of screeching banshees.

The main aspect in which In Your Pit differs from other JK Flesh releases is tempo. So far Pressure has generally specialised in slow, scud-missile anarcho-dub. This trend continues here. Rather than fronting a set of high-octane industrial techno bangers, Broadrick instead slows his synths down to a zombie-like lurch. As well as giving these tracks a hypnotic quality, the additional space between the beats provided by these lumbering tempos allows those thick synths the time to hit even harder. It’s no surprise that Martin himself felt keen to have a go at remixing In Your Pit’s title-track as The Bug - nor is it surprising that this entry is a ten-tonne soundsystem destroyer.

In Your Pit is another mighty entry in Broadrick’s discography.