Infoldings / Diffractions

Ever since the near-total reductions of techno and uk bass by SND around the turn of the millennium, Yorkshireman Mark Fell has been a constant presence in experimental music – one every bit as boundary-pushing, but also as bloody-mindedly mischievous and refusing of academic dryness, as his fellow English Northerners Autechre. His work has always prioritised rhythm, albeit fractured, and this collaboration with French-resident Australian percussionist Guthrie puts rhythm on top of rhythm on top of rhythm. Fell’s glitching, swooping, swiping manipulations of Guthrie’s playing is sometimes as ultra-minimal as his early work, but tends to pile on the complexity over the course of these four long jams. And they really do feel like jams: though they constantly pull the rug away from under the part of the brain that expects regularity, they nonetheless progress like the best free jazz into something utterly absorbing. Ritual music for higher dimensional beings, perhaps.