Powell – 11–14
Comprehensive two-CD collection showcasing Powell's club-breaking series of 12" singles.
Syncing the muscle memory of late '90s drum and bass with a kink for the toughest '80s industrial and bleeding-edge electronics, Powell's music has emerged as a virile antidote to the conservatism of current dance music. With his first pair of self-released singles, The Ongoing Significance of Steel & Flesh (2011) and the Body Music EP (2012), he established an ascetic, bare-bones approach that resonated with the original no wave mantra – “rip it up and start again” – in a barefaced challenge to what was then deemed acceptable on the dancefloor.
Precedent set, the controversial four-track Untitled EP (2013) revealed a more optimized, muscular take on his rollicking torque and freeform, caustic electronics at the cusp of the analog/digital schism. Late 2013 saw the coiled hard-step of Fizz and his most explicit alloys of motorik jungle-techno, before the Club Music EP combined all of these influences and exploded with spectacular, unpredictable brilliance, dosing a whole rave's worth of overloaded sensation into three brutally edited constructions, including the notorious “Maniac,” starring label-mate Russell Haswell.