- James Whipple's latest release comes with a Haiku-like text, inviting us to imagine "Stealth pilots speaking / in the upper atmosphere / telepathically," and to consider the producer himself as "being DAW / guiding a rogue missile." As M.E.S.H., Whipple is one of several young producers whose grim fascination with contemporary technology and warfare recalls the Italian futurists of the early 20th century. The cover of "Infra-Dusk / Infra-Dawn," with its lines of shattering and explosion, isn't miles away from a futurist ode to mechanised velocity like Giacomo Balla's Abstract Speed + Sound. Its titles, meanwhile, recall an interview given by a former US drone pilot to Der Spiegel in 2012. The pilot recounted switching to infrared sight on hot summer nights and observing Afghan couples sleeping on their roofs. "I saw them having sex with their wives. It's two infrared spots becoming one."
Of course, nobody's suggesting this new lot are, like many of the futurists, proto-fascists. Apart from anything else, we live in a very different time. The futurists took a naive thrill in the clamour of industrial society, and responded accordingly. Musicians now are faced with a hyper-networked world of silence and extreme speed. "Infra-Dusk/Infra-Dawn" is best understood as a response to that world.
Whipple's music isn't without precedents. "Infra-Dusk"shares its stilted groove with Autechre's "LCC." The swooshing polyrhythms of breakout track "Scythians" invited similar comparisons. But, just as fellow Berliner TCF sounds like Raster-Noton on cracked software, Whipple's music betrays his tools: the gridded contours of a DAW. "Infra-Dawn" is the more expansive of the two tracks and, with its liquid swells of chords, the prettier. Like its partner, it's extremely focussed and engaging, but remains tonally ambiguous. Those hollow pad-textures don't evoke strong emotions so much as a state of distant unease—the soundtrack, perhaps, to a finger pulling a trigger on the other side of the world.
TracklistA1 Infra-Dusk
A2 Infra-Dawn