Wrecked Lightship make music that evokes nice civilizations collapsing—crumbling constructions and ruined grandeur, marble columns disappearing beneath sea-foam. Its imaginative scope is barely distant from the music that the duo’s members made their names with. Laurie Osborne, greatest often called Appleblim, got here up as a DJ on the foundational London dubstep nights FWD>> and DMZ and helmed the Cranium Disco label alongside Shackleton; over the previous decade and a half, he has flitted between home, techno, bass music, and hairsplitting hybrids of all of them, sometimes with no less than one eye on the dancefloor. Adam Winchester additionally has a background in dubstep, beneath the alias Wedge, although his more moderen experimental music—within the duo Dot Product and beneath his personal identify—provides a touch of the place Wrecked Lightship’s world-building tendencies would possibly come from. Winchester’s industrial soundscaping suggests mainframes on the fritz and nuclear cores in meltdown, dystopian sci-fi fantasies enjoying out on a galactic scale.
Antiposition is the duo’s third album in as a few years. The place 2022’s Drowned Aquariums and 2023’s Oceans and Seas typically veered into pure abstraction, Antiposition places the percussion first. The improvisatory drift of the earlier data has given method to a newfound focus; the bass and drums sound like they’ve been designed to face as much as the gale-force winds of the duo’s dubwise results. The file’s depth is shocking partially due to its context: The label releasing it, Peak Oil, is healthier identified for the wispier, extra amorphous sounds of artists like Purelink and Topdown Dialectic. In comparison with their grainy fantasias, Antiposition is a twister trailing particles in its wake.
Throughout the album, the duo maintains a cautious steadiness between membership inclinations and extra psychedelic results. Within the opener “Hex,” syncopated kicks and big Reese bass name again to canonical tropes from the hardcore continuum, whereas flickering bleeps and bursts of white noise fill out the environment. It’s each highly effective and enveloping, a full-body blow that looks like an embrace. So is “Weird Servants,” whose thrumming drums—faintly paying homage to Aphex Twin’s traditional Bradley’s Robotic EP—recommend taiko drummers in a wind tunnel. The heart beat is hard and driving, however a gleaming, tape-warped synth melody provides an optimistic word to the temper of grim dedication.
