Porn Sword Tobacco & SVN – Feels Good
Introduced to me by the first of the collaborations with SVN on Kontra-Musik last year, Porn Sword Tobacco’s name and repeated past turns on IDM stronghold City Centre Offices (one of Shlom of Boomkat’s contemporarily lesser known ventures) displayed a kind of turned ’90s to ’00s ideological daftness that hasn’t aged all too gracefully. I had my reservations about Aphex-by-proxy loonyism. In truth, Complaints found the artist complimenting the reduced, pulsing techno palette of SVN with remarkable subtlety – Badalamenti chords so silky smooth and a constant minimalist pressure that Robert Hood strove for, albeit slightly gentler.
Two further pieces for the Acido compilation 12″ My House Is Not Your House backed this up later in the year, the smallest dabs of melody adding a remarkable and demure colour in that particular Acido/SUED sort of way. Their return to Kontra-Musik with Feels Good is more or less business as usual. It often seems that new projects involving SW or SVN or the SUED camp will begin to fold in on themselves and inhibit a centralised identity, and tracks here could be readily interchangeable with Fett Burger & SVN’s XI dubs, or the less dark ambient-touched of Snorre Magnar Solberg’s Club No-No interferences.
Woody, xylophonic patter and a single, encompassing bassline are signatures and remain a delightfully light manner to convey body pressure, whilst a new dubwise atonality and arhythmic presence (that delivers the XI dub session comparisons) comes into play for the first 6 or so minutes of the A-side. The increasingly moody bassline eventually breaking the pacing enough for the two to start another rhythmic build.
The B-side tracks are much straighter. B1 is a cleaned up and relatively straight ahead piece of techno with the kind of pace and lite-funk that might slide into the middle of an Actress set. B2 is even techier, stripped of any padding or melodic structure and favouring chopped up Mills bell samples mixed down to give them distance. Much, much closer to a dancefloor track than the squashy sofa/club spectrum that these guys usually reside in. Creative tools.
Matthew Kent
Tracklisting:
A1. Untitled
B1. Untitled
B2. Untitled