Point B - The Veld

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  • Londoner Point B has been one of the cornerstones of Cambridge's Frijsfo Beats label thus far, veering between dubstep and tough garage and even electro, incorporating live instruments and other deft touches. The Veld is his third album overall and first for the label, and shows off a confident and varied production hand, with tempos ranging from 106 to 150 beats per minute. Point B's sound is dark and paranoid, THC haze clinging to the steel and sinew that make up these beats. The opener and title track lays down the theme pretty well: rigid percussion oscillates with a downswing into murky LFO wobbles, accented with chimes, bits of string, and a manipulated, autotuned South Asian singer. It recalls equally the sinogrime experiments of Dusk & Blackdown and the newer work of LHF, a vision of London that's all dark corners, imagined harems and other seedy dens of iniquity. It's all over the album. Just listen to the ominous flutes on "Black Amber" or the Indian string instruments that paint themselves all over "Jetsam Collector." The array of detuned and broken string instruments and other techno-exoticism that Point B chooses is reminiscent of Nine Inch Nails' The Fragile. (If you know "The Mark Has Been Made" from that album, it's not a bad starting point for the sound palette of The Veld.) The pendulum swing of "The Closure" feels nearly obsessive-compulsive, especially as it sounds like he's forcefully plucking guitar strings right off the neck one by one. The one-two punch of distorted drums on "Hydrogen" is pure '90s pop-industrial. But despite all the analogues we might affix to it—you could probably fit in some trip-hop in there too—The Veld feels curiously free of the current "bass music" narrative. You won't find much experimenting with house rhythms here. Instead, the album presents us with a post-human world of industrial decay and rusting machines, what's left when we leave our music to the devices of automation. It's not always friendly, but possesses an attractively alien allure all the same.
  • Tracklist
      01. The Veld 02. Black Amber 03. The Closure 04. Fen 05. Range Dweller 06. Versus 07. Fossils 08. Hydrogen 09. Jetsom Collector 10. Pacific Torque
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