Death by Tickling

A Japanese artist who cut his teeth in the early days of the Southern English breakcore scene then renamed himself after a Ugandan street food while expanding outwards into all kinds of manifestations of global bass music, teaming up with a lugubrious Lancastrian with a squat punk background and taste for apocalyptic imagery and absurdist expression who had a stint on the outsider fringes of dubstep and techno in London before carving out a unique dub space for himself in Berlin? Why yes, that IS how we like our modern psychedelia to be birthed. On Death by Tickling, Shigeru Ishihara — formerly DJ Scotch Egg, now Scotch Rolex after musical epiphanies at Uganda’s Nyege Nyege festival — and Sam Shackleton have entirely merged their musical personalities. Poly-metric chimes, bamboo xylophones and other organic percussion give a fourth world feel, gigantic sub bass gives a sense of the earth itself playing along, but for all the weirdness and weight it’s a strangely comforting listen, like floating through a tropical forest on warm currents of air — though watch for the flying piranhas…