Sigha - Politics of Dying

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  • Let's not beat around the bush: Sigha makes techno music. Not the kind of watered down tech house that gets consistently mis-sold as "underground techno" to the casual clubbers of his native London. Nor the sort of vapid Ostgut Lite that pours out of SoundCloud's every orifice these days. No, Sigha's techno is, for want of a less abused word, proper. Chunky dub-tech jackers "Rawww" and "Shake" were the first flagrantly 4/4 tracks he put out, while a subsequent debut release on Our Circula Sound and growling remixes for Steadfast and Echocord plunged things into ice cold warehouse territory, aligning him with the likes of Claro Intelecto and Peter van Hoesen. Nevertheless, while all this suggested the producer's dubstep days were on the wane (if not simply extinct), people continue(d) to associate him with the genre. But not, God forbid, any more: Politics of Dying is—to use an obvious pun—the nail in that preconception's coffin. And a righteous nail it is too, thanks to a pumping title track and two careful remixes. There's not a great deal to say about "Politics of Dying" beyond the fact that if you marry a giant, twanging elastic lead to a murderous puke bucket of a kick drum, you get a bomb. Throw in some carefully layered ambience and deft structural shifts, and you get a great piece of music too. That UK techno legend James Ruskin agrees to remix it, and does so in the stateliest of fashions, says as much. Where Sigha's original is thumping and insistent, Ruskin's take is blissfully smudged and hazy—all strummed rubber and gently arching pads—without losing any of the high end detail or low end punch so effective in its forbearer. Shifted's version of "Over the Edge," on the other hand, is more a reduction than a rework, boiling things down to only a handful of elements—each as decayed and greyscale as the other—and extracting a morbid sort of groove in the process.
  • Tracklist
      A1 The Politics of Dying A2 Over the Edge (Shifted Remix) B The Politics of Dying (James Ruskin Remix)
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