- An album of beatless rave music that highlights the power of space and silence—and sub-bass.
- The video for "Airdrop 03 (Mayhem On Barton Hill)," a single from Low End Activist's jagged, beatless album Airdrop, is a collage of quietly unsettling imagery. Mangled archival film clips from the '90s rave scene melt into themselves like grotesque AI hallucinations, the camera menacingly pans across an oil rig at night, a ship approaches slowly from a distance. Dancers' pupils are too dark, the sea too vast. There's a washed-out patina to it all that disappears halfway through when the song's tension-building ambient section soundtracks a shot of endless, glassy ocean. The grimy home video effect reappears as the drums kick back in, the clip's slo-mo crawl turning ravegoers' euphoric glances at the camera into shifty-eyed paranoia. It ends with scenes of waves crashing in a turbulent storm, as if to warn there's no tranquility or bliss to be found.
For the better part of a decade, the Berlin-via-Bristol producer, born Jamie Russell, has stripped club music to the studs, winking at specific genres without fully claiming one. His heavy, low-lit sound is a fractalised view of what makes a dance floor tick, arranging fragments of samples, horror-movie synths and chest-caving bass into spiky, hypnotic rhythms. Russell's early work, especially his 2019 eponymous EP, drew heavily from dub and Afro-Caribbean soundsystem culture, while later projects like 2022's Hostile Utopia added bits of grime and hip-hop into the mix. With Airdrop, Russell takes scissors to drum & bass, splicing breakbeats with programmed drums, layering greyscale pads over atonal bleeps. It's a challenging but rewarding collection of writhing, propulsive contemporary IDM, blown apart and refashioned as jittery ambient music—as disquieting as it is mesmerizing.
The album steadily builds on itself like the patient, cyclical construction of a 3D-printer. It's difficult to find solid ground at the beginning—the first couple of cuts are among the sparest compositions Russell's ever put to tape. "Airdrop 01 (Waterstock)" is mostly space and rhythmic echoes, as if a building collapsed but left the scaffolding intact, while "Airdrop 02 (Yarnton Rd 2 Cassington)" is murky dub techno that coalesces and dissipates at regular intervals. Across Airdrop, Russell never lets one instrument dictate a song's pulse. Occasionally, a sequencer line ("Airdrop 06 (Praha Hardcore)") or looped break ("Airdrop 05 (White Horse Hill)") will carry through for the entire track, but Russell typically favors letting elements pass the baton amongst themselves, taking up the beat when another cuts off abruptly or fades into a field of dubwise delay. The overall effect is disconcerting. Your body's moving, but you're not sure who's controlling it.
Despite Russell's slice-and-dice approach, Airdrop never trades sound design intricacy for accessibility. These are still club jams at their core—"Airdrop 07 (Tango Skit)" features a face-melting bass drop at its midpoint that seamlessly moves the track from grayscale jungle to relentless techno. Russell punctuates the Hi-NRG chords that bounce through "Airdrop 09 (Cortina Ourto)"—not with the four-on-the-floor beat you'd expect, but with blasts of 808 triplets, creating a version of house music drained of its blood but not of its power. It's a record that finds transcendence in destruction, pinpointing its strength in the spaces left by excavation.
Tracklist01. Airdrop 01 (Waterstock)
02. Airdrop 02 (Yarnton Rd 2 Cassington)
03. Airdrop 03 (Mayhem On Barton Hill)
04. Airdrop 04 (Squeeze Yer Lemon)
05. Airdrop 05 (White Horse Hill)
06. Airdrop 06 (Praha Hardcore)
07. Airdrop 07 (Tango Skit)
08. Airdrop 08 (Hinksey Hardcore)
09. Airdrop 09 (Cortina Outro)