Bleep

Roly Porter’s ‘Life Cycle of a Massive Star’, his second album, continues with the cinematic grandeur of debut ‘Aftertime’, strengthening and refining its distinctive palette. In contrast to electronic music’s more pervasive wide-eyed relationship with themes of space and the cosmos, through dreamy kosmiche Krautrock to futurist Detroit anthems, Porter creates here a sound which focusses upon mankind’s uneasy rapport with space in an album which soundtracks a star’s life from birth to destruction. ‘Cloud’ pits washes of low drones against stutters of broken rave-chord reiterations, while highlights ‘Giant’ and ‘Gravity’ show the traces of the producer’s earlier dubstep work as half of duo Vex’d in their potent combination of pummelling low end wobble and spacious pastoral strings.