- British producer Paula Temple has been around since the early '00s, but slipped off the radar after her well-received 2002 EP Speck Of The Future. Last year she returned to the studio, and the Colonized EP is the most visible marker of her comeback so far. This self-described "noisician" seems to have found kindred spirits in the UK's new industrial techno generation. Unlike many of her contemporaries, though, Temple seems intent on injecting some political energy back into the form. The tracks on this release were inspired by "imagining what it would sound like to resist the control systems we encounter every day, to refuse standardisation and covert forms of colonization." It's an abstract manifesto, but its logic is perhaps evident in the way these tracks reject standard dance floor structuring, preferring to unfold in strange, volatile ways.
The title track turns heads with a shrieking drone that moves queasily into the foreground at the opening, but is soon obliterated by a snare drum. "Cloned," a razor-sharp broken beat track that's faintly reminiscent of Regis's syncopated stormers as Kalon, plays a similar trick, its breakdown functioning as an innocuous palette cleanser before we're overwhelmed by a series of towering synth tones. "Decolonization," meanwhile, is the most bewildering of the lot, opening with yammering percussion that gradually dissolves into ghostly vocal textures, before spending the following three minutes struggling to regain its feet. Fittingly, Perc turns in a pair of remixes of the title track. The "Metal Mix" is the highlight, recasting those battering snares as deafening noise spikes, fearsome instruments of terror sparingly deployed over his trademark noise-techno framework.
Tracklist A Colonized
B1 Colonized (Perc Metal Mix)
B2 Cloned