For all the talk of nostalgia that surrounded his 2011 debut LP under the Kuedo guise, Severant, Jamie Teasdale is not a producer willing to dwell heftily on the past. As one half of Bristol-based dubstep duo Vex’d in the early ‘00s, Teasdale (alongside partner and now fellow soloist Roly Porter) was responsible for some of the genre’s formative and most dystopian sounds. Speaking to The Quietus in 2011 however, Teasdale said “Vex’d doesn’t really come into my thinking about what I’m doing”, and that certainly echoed in Severant, which saw him do away with dubstep while maintaining the sense of grandeur he and Porter had always exercised, this time through glacial synths and fast, sharp hi-hats.
Both Teasdale and Porter have always seemed to create some of the most other-worldly, visual mirages (see also Roly Porter’s 2013 full-length Life Cycle of a Massive Star). Assertion of a Surrounding Presence is Teasdale’s first freshly recorded work since late 2012, and although apparently composed in hurried conditions last year it exerts a sense of control and self-understanding that in turn reflects the mentality of someone absolutely aware of the space and emotions they’re aiming to capture.
Speaking to Fact Mag about the EP earlier this year Teasdale fleshed out the both political and mystical connotations that the record’s track titles provoke, saying: “Planetary computation as a militarized zone. Latent potential for states, psychological and infrastructural, to destabilize, disrupt and dissolve. For such ambient presences to physically materialize and assert themselves. For known systems to become uncanny. Emergence out of complex systems. The here, the now”. There’s a heavy sense of both discovery and confusion running through the entire record, which in turn straddles the line between light and dark, comfort and uncertainty.
Apart from short centre-piece “Case Type Classification,” which feels like a deconstruction with its stagnant synths and bongo-based percussion, Assertion of a Surrounding Presence is deep set and layered, and throughout its run time it traverses from being a comfortable, solidly placed society to a civilisation born again and with a refreshing new constitutional core by the time the somewhat triumphant closer “Cellular Perimeter” comes around. Like certain aspects of the unrest that exists in UK politics at the moment, Assertion of a Surrounding Presence is a record as concerned with life and the arrival of new hopes and ideas coming to the fore as it is with outlying an alien landscape (though of course in 2015 the two are by no means mutually exclusive). In the middle is plenty of malcontent and distrust, an unfurling of an established grip and a re-evaluation of the principles that are most important to a multi-levelled society co-existing. It wouldn’t be necessarily unfair to suggest that Teasdale is making a stand in the most transgressive and indeed artistic way he knows how.
“Border State Collapse” has a thorough sense of motion, as though one is travelling across vast, barren post-collapse plains towards an unnerving target, a sense of dread informed by what society could encounter on its way to a new beginning. The throbbing bass and almost comforting blanket of synth arpeggios on “Boundary Regulation” feel like the first uncertain but slightly more confident steps towards discovering a new world, a new lease of life. Following the sparse crash of “Case Type Classification” comes the haunting “Eyeless Angel Convention.” Hellish choral incantations form the lead melody through an increasingly dark, heavy soundscape. Incidentally, it’s also the most club-floor friendly moment here, with mannerisms that ever-so-slightly recall Actress and The Bug’s brutal approach to atmospherics. There is tension in the occasional ghostly rushes of low-end synth on “Event Tracking across Populated Terrain” which title-wise could be a sly finger pointed at the recent governments’ mechanical restriction of the Arts industry, but its overture feels warm and comfortable, as though the fight back has begun.
Assertion of a Surrounding Presence may only be seven tracks long, but it’s ability to make one feel like they’re in a totally different, more exuberant world is a double-edged, psychedelically imagined sword of which both edges are razor sharp.
Rating: 4/5