- Well, it's only been six months since Perc released his brilliant Wicker & Steel LP and its flagship cut "London, We Have You Surrounded," but we have a worthy successor: George Lanham's "Cambridge Offensive." It too writhes on a savage broken beat, but in place of Ali Wells' grainy battering, we're incessantly sliced by shuddering, scalpel-like wires of synth. From its heavy yet precise kicks to its legions of haranguing cymbals, every part feels judiciously selected to cause maximum harm. Masochism at its most pleasurable. Dead Sound's remix is comparatively kinder, downsizing the vicious wires to echoing calls and swapping the breakbeat for scrabbling percussion. Interestingly, however, his mechanised creations pause somewhere near the middle, a few bars of the original allowed to elbow their way in, verbatim. It's as if someone slammed the crossfader mid-song.
Lanham's other piece, "Ridley Road," is a mass of detuned chords, the same slicing wires reflected in a funhouse mirror, distorted and softened somewhat. Somewhat. There's still an enormous amount of aggression here, transmitted mainly via the sucking, hard house-like low-end and a series of caustic, horn blasts which puncture it. Minimum Syndicat's remix, meanwhile, is the kid who can't beat the bullies—Lanham's two originals, in this case—by force, so instead acts weird till they piss off. Excepting the kick and some diminuitive metallic clinks, pretty much everything is pitch-bent; horror synths, sirens and galvanised pianos screeching and bleeding dementedly into one another. This is only the first record on Lanham's new label, Pareto Park. Ignore the imprint's next few at your peril.
Tracklist 01. Ridley Road
02. Cambridge Offensive
03. Cambridge Offensive (Dead Sound Remix)
04. Ridley Road (Minimum Syndicat Remix)