- Minimalism hasn't always been a quality associated with the music of Sam Shackleton. Projects like Music For The Quiet Hour and The Drawbar Organ EPs reveled in long-form sprawl, while last year's Freezing, Opening, Thawing used hyper-detailed structures to evoke processes of growth and decay. But in the second half of the year, Shackleton changed tack. The two-part Deliverance series used the same distinctive materials, but sculpted them into a series of linear, slowburning epics—perhaps the closest he's come to conventional techno. Which makes it fitting that he's now made good on a long-standing plan to remix Nisennenmondai, an outfit with their own skewed take on techno.
This guitar-bass-drums trio take kosmische minimalism to a logical extreme, their relentless four-to-the-floor epics matching the intensity, if not the technical spec, of a peaktime techno set. It's an approach with which Shackleton finds a fertile middle ground. There's plenty of him in these remixes: on "B-1' (Remix)"'s hipwinding bassline, for instance, or the way that Masako Takada's guitar effects are broken down into small loopable chunks. The detail is gorgeous and the sense of progression perfectly judged, even if the results feel just a little lacking in the urgency both artists have brought to their own work. The collaboration really achieves lift-off on "A' (Remix)." A dash of speed helps, but more significant is the use of space: busy Shackletonian textures are woven denser and denser, before being whipped away to reveal the barest skeleton of bass and drums. It's a thrilling effect, and one that neither artist could've achieved on their own—which is all you can ask of a remix, really.
TracklistA1 A' (Remix)
B1 B-1' (Remix)