Audiopile Review: There’s an expectation that electronic music should be futuristic. This seems unfair given that, by our estimate, it’s existed as a form for three quarters of a century. But we feel it too. When a legit futuristic electronic music album comes across our desk, we’re all like: “Hell yeah, this is how it’s supposed to be!” With alarming regularity, those albums come to us via LA’s Peak Oil label, (home of Topdown Dialectic, arguably the most important new electronic music project of the last decade or so). The latest from Peak Oil is our record of the week, ‘Drained Strands’ by Berlin-based duo Wrecked Lightship. Their previous Peak Oil album, ‘Antiposition’, seriously got our attention, and ‘Drained Strands’ more than delivers on its promise. Riding in on some furious Jlin-style avant-footwork beats, these Wrecked Lightship MFs clearly mean business when it comes to that next shit. This album immediately recalls the sci-fi deconstruction of bass music continuum artifacts and regional dance music styles practiced by the Hyperdub label (home of Burial and whatnot). But where Hyperdub has a grittily earthbound cyberpunk aesthetic, ‘Drained Strands’ is spiced up and punching the hyperspace button with a frankly worrying fervour. Listen to enough Autechre and My Bloody Valentine and you do tend to end up setting a course for the next level. Be glad that there are brave explorers like Wrecked Lightship prepared to wreck their lightship to keep future music futuristic. But to be honest, you do not have to be particularly brave to join this specific intergalactic mission. Unlike, say, Rashad Becker’s astonishingly brilliant ‘The Incident’, this album is not imposingly cerebral or alien. There are enough familiar genre references and breathable pockets of dub space to make this a comfortable, albeit vertiginous mission to the outer rim. Sorry, we’ve been obsessively watching and re-watching ‘Andor’. Our point remains: this album is brilliant, both in the sense of being very good and the sense of being a blinding flash of wrecked light. And yes, we cannot help but feel that this is what electronic music SHOULD be like: always three quarters of a century ahead of the curve.

***

Peak Oil is proud to issue another slab of shattered fractals of dank and decomposed genre from the gifted deconstructionist duo that is Wrecked Lightship.

“Drained Strands” picks up almost immediately where their first installment left off, the listener is hurled immediately into the dubbed out, breaks-scattered, bass billowing, shrewdly sculpted world only capable from the unique visage of Adam Winchester and Laurie Osborne.

Spread across six scintillating tracks – Wrecked Lightship further their post-historic, studio-as-a-black-cauldron vantage point in a compelling and visionary way only these two can conjure.

Artwork once again stems from Brian Close – providing a similarly singular visual language to their auditory visions.