- In the pitched battle between ‘minimal vs. boredom’, there are times when I worry about the troops at the frontline. Armed with little more than the power of disavowal (‘we’re not that [dreaded, boring] minimal’) and a cracked copy of Ableton, they’re constantly fighting against dead repetitions without the support of melody, chorus or vocals. They’re out there, vulnerable, with little more than a penchant for timbre, basslines and the ability to bomb the soundscape with FX. Nonetheless they struggle tirelessly to keep the swarming abyss of monotony from the tender minds of jaded dancers, whose temporary enjoyment would be pillaged and violated should such ennui ever overcome their defences.
There are a few known strategies that work in this war, but the three most successful are hook, atmosphere, and narrative. Heartthrob’s ‘Baby Kate’ has the first strategy: without ever going anywhere or suggesting more than you ‘get the gist of’ in the first minute, the song leaves you craving that damned hook. You don’t want the track to go anywhere, so compelling is the holding pattern of the loop. The second strategy, atmosphere, is the toughest one to get right, because, after all, you’re relying on something as insubstantial as a gas. Anders Ilar is a producer who often deploys this approach successfully: even after the fourth minute – when you realise the track is ‘going nowhere’ – you still tend to want to hear it through, or maybe it’s just that you can’t move to turn it off with such an icy hand around your heart. The third strategy is best exemplified by Matt Dear’s excursions as False (although these excursions manage to deploy all three at their opportune moments). They keep your ears glued to the phone or keep your hips swinging as the great unfolding story enfolds you in it, constantly moving and deforming until it becomes, suddenly and atmospherically, a deadly hook.
'Dumbles Debuts' by Agnès (pronounced Ah-nyes, not Ag-nuss) is an ambitious attempt at deploying a ‘three-pronged’ attack similar to Dear’s. This is a work that seems to want to overcome the componential nature of its structure and present a cohesive piece that is simultaneously atmospheric, unfolding, and engagingly catchy.
'Debuts' begins at the ‘Wildlife Institute’, a shadowy place emptied of animals and filled with dusky gloom. There are voices in the empty reverb tank, snatched back to nothing by quick snips. It’s a stretched silence between this and ‘Hi Murda’, which melds a micro-boompty bassline to a very ‘You Don’t Need a Weatherman…’-era Carsten Jost theatre of dubbed-out anxiety, which turns the lights down and takes the paranoia up a few notches – setting the stage for the remainder of proceedings. ‘Carbonela’ sprinkles silicon-dry digital debris over a huge wiggling bassline that waits for the kick to drop. When it does fall, it’s so compressed that it hurts my ears, while on the stereo it stretches my poor old '80s-era KEF loudspeakers beyond their modest range – no doubt it sounds killer on a powerful system. ‘Personal Dub’ is a very Wighnomy-esque FX fest that (again) employs a very speaker-pushing compressed kick/bass combo to drive things along. 'Short on D' breaks up what has by this stage in the album become a monotonous pattern of track construction, with the same elements used and re-used to similarly reliable (if predictable) effect. With its long ambient intro and direction-suggesting melodic loop toward the end, the track hints at the possibility of a better way to bring together the atmosphere and hooks, but it’s a track that fades out too soon. ‘Controversial Advantages’ comes over all Warp/Modern Love on you after the repeated pummeling of the floor/functional numbers, with sad strings and a big, bad, melancholy bassbin rattling synthline that brings things back down, while ‘Things Recur’ closes the album with a pop-ambient elegy.
The last track also functions as a reminder that this album is aiming at synthesing both hooks and atmospheres into a storyline, but it comes all too late. By the time ‘Personal Dub’ dropped, I was already fighting my own battle against boredom. It’s a folly of inexperience more than a lack of talent – with time, practice and experience Agnès could well become capable of representing the sound-structures he is, so far at least, only capable of presenting, and in so doing, he could justly and skillfully come to relate his own tales of boredom-slaying. As a description of Agnès’ personal battle thus far against boredom, this most genre-specific of enemies, 'Dumbles Debuts' amounts to something lethargically oversoaked in its own the atmosphere, capable of sidling up to and often swinging with some interesting hooks, but fundamentally too preoccupied with making the same point again and again to rip a coherent, engaging yarn.
Tracklist1 Wildlife Institute
2 Hi Murda (LP Edit)
3 Drowning
4 Track 8
5 Wildlife Institute 2
6 Carbonela (Agnès Remix)
7 Lowdown Cycle
8 Personal Dub
9 Last Resort
10 Short On D (Recorded Live At Piping Club)
11 The Break (LP Edit)
12 Controversial Advantages
13 Things Recur