ALBUM OF THE DAY
Album of the Day: Nathan Fake, “Sunder”
By Amaya Garcia · February 21, 2018 Merch for this release:
Vinyl LP

The release of 2017’s Providence was important for Norfolk, England electronic music artist Nathan Fake. Though he’d been making music for years, Providence was his first album for visionary London label Ninja Tune, and was also the first one to feature collaborations with other artists. (Prurient’s Dominick Fernow supplies distorted vocals to the abrasive track “Degreelessness,” and Braids’ Raphaelle Standell-Preston sings on “RVK.”) It was also his first release after five years of relative silence, a period that, according to an interview with FACT, was marked by a constant touring to mask Fake’s dissatisfaction with the work he was creating at the time. That sense of frustration was all over Providence; a year later, it stands as Fake’s and most uneasy and abrasive record, an album that moved him away from bucolic, pastoral techno and into decidedly grayer territory.

Sunder, a new five-song EP that arrives around 11 months after Providence, combines Fake’s penchant for cinematic vistas and lush melodies with the urgency and punch of Providence; its first three tracks skew dark: “Arcaibh” has a kind of inherent roughness, every kick drum, snare, and handclap working parallel to one another but never quite melting together. At several points, the percussion is overpowered by a beautifully melancholic synth line, but this too fades away. The song eventually dissolves into a finale full of sharp clicks and tape fuzz, all sound eventually drowning in a sea of echo. For Sunder, Fake abandoned his previous production methods, which were purely computer-based, opting here to employ old Marantz tape decks, a Roland Jupiter-6 vintage synth, and a broken Akai drum machine, giving the songs an aged, slightly rickety feel.

But if the EP opens in darkness, it ends on an emotional high. “Cloudswept” has a driving dance beat and a dense, twisty, high-end synth line; it sounds destined for afterparty sets, with rippling, joyous notes bound to hit all the brain’s pleasure centers. “Lea” ends the EP with a journey into sci-fi minimalism, bubbling major-key monosynth lines floating up like the oil in a lava lamp. And while there are moments on Sunder that feel like a radical departure from Fake’s previous work, it also signals a deeper understanding of the ways to convey complex feeling into instrumental music. Sunder is an album of controlled chaos; perfectly disjointed, raw songs that demonstrate Fake’s growth and newfound confidence. Sunder is Fake in fearless mode, with minimal post-production and a youthful energy few of his contemporaries can match.

Amaya Garcia
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