- Angry techno with a message.
- Don't mix politics and dance music? This ain't an idea Manni Dee subscribes to. Since he started putting out records in 2010, the London producer's allusions to British politics have become more overt, his industrial-tinged techno more angry. In 2017 he released a track called "London Isn't England," both a reference to the 2016 EU referendum and a recent high-water mark for this type of techno. (Other track titles around this time included "The Jingoism Stench," "Cameron On A Guillotine" and "Abundant Fuckry." For more on this topic, see the 2017 interview he did with Tonka—remember him?) It's now been a couple years since Dee's last EP, but if its title—Everything Sullied—and its sound is anything to go by, Dee is feeling more disillusioned than ever.
A meta-analysis of the pyscho-political-cultural context that's birthed so much punishing techno is probably beyond the scope of a 12-inch review. So it's perhaps better to just say this stuff is an ideal salve for the current fuckry, to borrow Dee's term. A sonic anger release valve. Some tracks here are so hard that you might wonder if they've left planet techno altogether and crash-landed in the warped world of hardcore. The frantic synths on "Take & Never Give," the distorted voices on "Hostile Environment" and the cavernous noise on "Comply Or Die" could all have soundtracked Holly Dicker's Thunderdome opus from last year. It's crazy to think that the steel-cut breakbeat and laser-blast synths of "A Philistine Like You" could be seen as the comparatively restrained option. There are a lot of people making this sort of music right now, but few sound more pissed off than Dee.
TracklistA1 Take & Never Give
A2 Hostile Environment
B1 A Philistine Like You
B2 Comply Or Die