Audiopile Review: You might remember Wrecked Lightship from ‘Antiposition’, their Peak Oil album that we highlighted a little while back. Well, here they are again with a new vinyl edition of an album that predates ‘Antiposition’. To refresh your memory, Wrecked Lightship is an exploratory beat-making duo featuring dubstep legend Appleblim. As the group’s name and association with Peak Oil might lead you to expect, this is seriously futuristic material. We’re talking dubbed-out beats with a robotic sheen and a dystopian sci-fi vibe. Said vibe is maintained consistently throughout ‘Oceans and Seas’, despite the track-list travelling through a constellation of varying styles. While rooted in dubstep, the tracks evoke everything from the Subtext label’s darkly cinematic ambiance to Alva Noto’s formalistic glitch beats and Drexciya’s oceanic electro. There’s also an aspect of purely abstract sound manipulation that means these tracks never rely on pure repetition. It’s that sonic profundity that will keep you diving into this album’s inky depths as the present becomes the future.

Pointillist club rhythms and dense, porous dub clouds encircle the Wrecked Lightship as Laurie Osborne and Adam Winchester set sail for phantom islands once more. The nocturnal boatswains chart a course guided by pronounced percussive impulses, using physicality to navigate the looming atmospheric pressure that has become their signature style.

Opening tracks ‘Arial’ and ‘Third Law’ speak to the roots of Osborne and Winchester’s respective work as Appleblim and Wedge, dealing in dancefloor abstractions where techno, electro and dubstep once stood, but there’s much more at play than simple genre tags could ever express. ‘Third Law’s electro-static interference calls back to Winchester’s work in Dot Product, while the twitchy urgency and gnarly bass echoes Osborne’s ALSO project with Second Storey.

Wrecked Lightship is an anchorless concern, free to drift into experimental waters if the currents surge that way, and so ‘Kill Mirror’ and ‘Hydrotower’ head away from forthright structures to play around with sound design and full-frequency manipulation. It’s too kinetic and jagged to be considered ambient, even if it willfully shirks the dancefloor. But for every starboard swerve there’s a prevailing wind, and the likes of finely-tuned club weapon ‘Take It Back’ whip ahead with laser-eyed focus.

Nailing their split interests between immediacy and the avant-garde to the mast, Wrecked Lightship deepen the reach of their project on their second album. Whatever shape a specific track might take, Oceans & Seas serves as a paean to the art of sonic manipulation and spatial processing.