Audiopile Review: At present, the present has a nasty habit of cleaning up the past. Right now, some idiot is using a robot to make The Beatles sound like all their albums were made in Ableton. Or something. Point is, the past is complicated and messy, and that’s its charm. Furthermore, if you want to make music from the past relevant to the present, it’s better to muss it up a little than to buff and polish the heck out of it. So many overly computerized shoegaze and trip-hop pastiches doing the rounds are sorely lacking in heck. ‘Zero’, a wonderfully concise EP from MOBBS and Susu Laroche is the perfect antidote to this kind of heck-less BS. It sounds rooted in the grainy trudge of Tricky’s ‘Maxinquaye’ and the chaotic drama of Portishead’s second album, with a generous dash of Flying Saucer Attack’s lo-fi dreampop. But it isn’t all mid-90s Bristol. After all, this is a collaboration between a London producer and a French-Egyptian artist, released on a Manchester label (Modern Love). And it’s too damn messy to be an accurate pastiche. By making a mess of the past, MOBBS and Laroche have come up with something distinctly original and contemporary. We only wish there were more of it.

***

Clasping chiral energies on their debut collab, MOBBS brings a history spanning shadowy production work for big name artists to the grimly stylised vein of performance art and musick explored by Susu Laroche, an Egyptian-French with strong binds to chthonic contemporary London.

Their maiden sacrifice heightens the senses to blends of monotonic, sandalwood scented incantations and carpet-burned downbeats swept in slurred dub. Songs are subtly variegated in tone to spell out shifting plays of light evoking bedsit antechambers and warehouse innards lit by iPhone candle or extractor hood and emergency light bulbs on their last lumens.

It’s music that’s as elaborately serrated and blemished as early MBV, but positioned in a vastly different cultural landscape, drawing from hip-hop, drone, psych and basement noise. The pair’s range of cultural obsessions maintains a precarious balance between shadowy histories and an asphyxiating present; all too often, when the past is projected it’s thru a mollifying, nostalgic lens, so their critical, prudent hybrid sound is a vital, chilling corrective.

From the bell-ringing, chain-rattle jag of ‘Throne’ thru the sleepwalker drift of ‘Roam’, and concrete plangency of ‘Forest’, the marriage of MOBBS’ illusive textures with Laroche’s feel for analog image and film (as evinced in her art for the likes of Blackhaine and Mica Levi) imprints their sound in gauzy layers that leave fleeting impressions on the mind’s eye. At their heaviest, Laroche’s arcane declarations descend in impressive enactments, undressing the excesses of over-glossed trip hop to reveal and revel in the sound at its starkest, sexiest, for new waves of washed up souls.