Eamon Ivri, from Cork on the Irish south coast, is a polymath. He’s a poet (his nom de techno is taken from minimalist poet Aram Saroyan), a fascinating political thinker, and a searing online satirist of cultural mores (or “shitposter” as the vernacular has it). He is also one of the most exciting electronic music talents in the world right now. His first two solo albums, Gore-Tex In The Club, Balenciaga Amongst The Shrubs and Holy Light, and his recent Entropy in collaboration with Claire Guerin, are flat-out masterpieces, blurring the most out-on-the-edge ambient sonic abstraction and mindbending spoken word meanderings with club music oomph.
On this album, though, he’s leant heavily towards the latter. Listen to opening track “Rib” and you might even think he’s going for the commercial angle. It lifts, openly, from early Aphex Twin and related early-mid Nineties electronica in its clattering beats and eerie melodic riffs - but adds big sweep, big venue friendly modern production and dynamics in a way that ends up not dissimilar to huge modern names like Daniel Avery and Bicep. And in fact, played by the right DJs you could perfectly imagine it filling huge arenas.
The rest of the album, though, tests the edges of the commercial comfort zone to say the least with distortion, hyperactive tempos and a kind of ritualistic mania which big room techno should have but all too rarely shies away from. It’s frequently sublime: “Tactile Love”, “i i i i i“ and “Hang Tight” in particularly are bangers for the ages, instantly thrilling but with manifold detail that only emerges on repeat listens. It notably doesn’t have the variety, dramatic structure, or peculiar poetry of previous Lighght albums - which is not a problem in itself: it works excellently on its own terms, but the thought of what happens when the energy levels achieved here combine with the full weird breadth of its predecessors is perhaps even more thrilling.
Listen to "Rib"
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