- Bristol's Nick Edwards hit a career high with this year's Unfidelity, his first album for Planet Mu. Rock La Bibliotek isn't quite as approachable as that bright, melodic LP, but its conceit will be sufficient to draw in a few new sets of ears. The label is South London's West Norwood Cassette Library, better known for rambunctious house and techno than for the murky, dubwise sonics with which Edwards has made his name. The brief was simple: that Edwards should attempt to make something applicable for the dance floor. The challenge seems to have galvanised Edwards: sparse and relatively simple, these tracks draw on dance music's yen for concision and immediacy, if not, often, its actual forms.
As tends to be the case with Edwards, the titles hold the clues. The brief "Evakuate" riffs on the sound of an emergency klaxon; "Metronomik" takes the "regular beat" thing to pedantic extremes, sculpting the tick-tock of a digital metronome into a piece of claustrophobic dub techno. That and "Sarkaztik" play it straightest, their 4/4 grooves managing to sound surprisingly graceful in spite of their sluggish tempos. Elsewhere, things get less interesting as Edwards strays further from the brief. "Ekztatik"'s grid of percussion functions more as a support for the drones wheeling overhead than a motor pushing them along. "Perplekzed" and "Dropkone" lapse into the murky bleeps and bloops of classic Ekoplekz, and as such contain fewer surprises. The latter in particular, with its palpitating sub-bass pulse, seems more likely to induce discomfort on a dance floor than to stir it into motion.
TracklistA1 Sarkaztik
A2 Evakuate
A3 Dropkone
B1 Metronomik
B2 Perplekzed
B3 Ekztatik