After last year’s excellent ‘Insula’ album, Proc Fiskal returns to Hyperdub with the six track EP ‘Shleekit Doss’; in his own words, “a kind of representation of the time I was running the club night of the same name in Edinburgh.”
“These tunes represent the night’s ethos of genre-defiance and high-energy futuristic sets, ecstatic and transcendent while still being fun and stupid. I was getting my friends to play and I made all the posters on my phone – like this EP’s artwork. I also started hoarding old FM synths which crop up a lot on the EP, and was reading a lot of sci-fi like Isaac Asimov’s ‘Foundation’, and ‘2001’. The night ran until last November when the bouncers and some punters got in a fight, the club got damaged, and unfortunately I got banned too.”
Through this mayhem and misdemeanour, ‘Shleekit Doss’ feels like an oasis
of calm; light, bouncy and melodic, the EP sees Proc developing the depth and
range of his music in satisfying ways. The beatless, processed male voice choirs
of ‘Satan’ open the set, breaking into glitchy drums before the melodies are
time-stretched into a pretty drone and gentle rolling piano. Clouds of
bittersweet synths waft across cut-up voices and clattering drums on
‘Smith’s Deli’,
while ‘Pico’ is a driving mix of tight, tiny micro-edits that feel like
micro-house crossbred with jungle breaks.
‘2 Moros’ takes the Sinogrime developed on ‘Insula’ deeper into dense rhythmic abstraction, and on ‘4 minutes’, charming synth melodies and 8-bit bass lines are threaded through skeletal drum machine kicks and snares. ‘Prop-ODeed’ finishes the EP, Proc Fiskal displaying his inimitable gift for heart-wrenching anthemic melody, built around tuned Asian percussion and scratchy synth violin.