Bleep

Pinch announces a new EP with Border Control. If the other two are anything to go by we’re in for one hell of a ride. Pitched as both an ode to British soundsystem culture and rebuke of our current Brexit nightmare, Pinch is in a frankly hellish mood on Border Control’s title-track. We’ve honestly never heard anything quite like this tune’s mix of anarcho-dub bassweight, slamming gabber beats and atmospherics so foreboding they could pass for doom metal. Closer ‘Loose Cables’ comes off like ‘Border Control’s creepy, insidious younger brother. Sandwiched between these we get the roiling soundsystem techno slammer ‘Fortune Tellers’. Quite a record. Levelled against looming uncertainties of the current political climate (Brexit, the rise of fascism, you name it), as well recalling UK sound system culture’s dark negative, Pinch’s Border Control EP is a furious object of civil and artistic disobedience. ‘Border Control’ thumps with skipping-CD stubbornness, while ‘Fortune Tellers’ resembles something nearly danceable, albeit in the way of Hellish industrialism. ‘Loose Cables’ unleashes a deadly, gabber-esque beat punctuated by a beat that sounds like a tumbling avalanche. This is experimental electronic music from the shadows; the sound of ecstatic ire fashioned in the angry fringes.