The phrase ‘disrupting techno’ is one that gets thrown around a lot in electronic music and critics circles, usually in reference to an act who breaks the mould of techno purism, but for all accounts is still making techno. As a style born as a form of disruption in of itself, it’s necessary to think about what we’re actually trying to say when we say someone or something is ‘disrupting techno.’ Somehow, the sound that was born from Black progenitors and disruptors in the basements of Detroit found itself being established as a quasi-school of taste. Usurped by (mostly) white (male) tastemakers, the style and its varying off-shoots somehow became meticulously categorised and sub-categorised by way of an unseen Techno Rulebook. Being able to pin-point the exact stylistic origin of a track, meanwhile, an honours badge to wear with smug pride on your School of Techno blazer. Essentially, ‘disrupting’ in these circles means bending the rules just enough to be subversive, but never to the point of a visit to the principle’s office. Enter SHXCXCHCXSH, the Swedish duo who are pushing things right to the brink of potential expulsion.
Honestly, calling SHXCXCHCXSH’s music techno is a bit of an obligation to the rulebook. In accordance to said book, it A) conforms to a relentless common time beat and B) loops around itself enough with little to no progression but beyond that, what SHXCXCHCXSH creates is otherwise sparse, abstract pieces of boundary pushing electronica. Folding in doses of IDM and influences from the beating heart of current club innovations, their music, like their nomenclature, is hard to explain. It’s designed to sweep you up, throwing you into a blender of sounds and textures that tear each other apart and reform into something new altogether. On their latest EP Kongestion, the elusive duo present some of their most aggressive and subversive work to date, monstrously buzzing and pounding masses of sound design that are both amorphous but bound to structure, pummelling through whatever pre-conceived notion you may have of what techno should or could sound like. Is it industrial? Minimal? Both? Neither? SHXCXCHCXSH propose that it doesn’t actually matter, what it is is an experience.
Kong opens the EP with ravey hoover stabs and a pounding sub-bass beat which seemingly switches signatures at the track’s mid-way point. Air-horn like synths blare obnoxiously as the beat grows in intensity, spitting you out into the erratic throbbing of Onge. The music here is synthesised from few elements, mostly abysmal bass and distorted percussion, with everything sounding as if it’s been filtered through layers of static and white noise. Kongestion literally buzzes with this sort of propulsive energy. Esti, for instance, is basically just energy, a pattern of heavily distorted pads and looping chopped static that forms a somewhat discernible beat, sans any drum machines or kicks. It’s like listening to a transmission from the bowels of Berghain by way of a two-way radio. Nges buzzes with static and metallic industrial grinds before being taken over by a wailing siren synth and surging, distorted bass that sounds like the malfunctioning of a power station motherboard. Then there’s the repetitive tribalism of Gest, which veers into Current Value electronic chaos with its layers of machine sounds and menacing cyber noise.
Download and stream Kongestion here
It makes sense that this is an EP of distortion. Its name (and track titles) alludes to something clogged, pushing through to the surface all at one. In many ways, that’s what the music here does and in doing so, consumes itself into fuzzy states of agitation. Closing track Tion threatens to burst through the surface at any moment, a subterranean rave full of wheezing and whooshing hoover synths and sledgehammering drums, but instead the entire thing is compressed and pressurised, overlaid with an insistent rattling noise like a valve teetering at breaking point. Stio, the album’s softest moment, plays out behind walls of white noise through which parts of a kick or a hint of synth poke through, as if SHXCXCHCXSH are tuning the channel to find their own broadcast. Kongestion is very much like the experience of trying to tune into the hardest going party in all the world from an old television set or distrubed car radio, a proposed mirage of something that you can’t quite seem to find the frequency to. Its opposition to techno’s usual preference for austere clarity challenges the form itself. If it’s heard through endless layers of static, is it still techno, or something new? SHXCXCHCXSH don’t really propose an answer on Kongestion, but rather dare you to throw the rule book out the window and just get lost in their dancefloor dystopia.
Listen to Esti from Kongestion below.
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