First blood
Michigan-born UK-based producer reformats her arttechno for the dancefloor. By Andrew Male.
WHEN KAREN GWYER first moved to London from New York in the mid-noughties, she was drawn to the experimental music scenes around Dalston’s Cafe Oto. Her earliest releases, such as 2012 cassette, I’ve Been You Twice, and 2013’s debut LP Needs Continuum, were contemplative, multi-layered works, that blended pulsing analogue rhythms with euphoric waves of ambient melancholy and her ghostly cries and whispers, referencing both her Midwest upbringing as a classically-trained violinist, and late-night Michigan drives listening to Detroit techno. Gradually, that sound changed and hardened, influenced by her live, improvisatory sets, and the realisation that she was playing to a particular kind of modern London club kid who regarded such performances ass it-down music appreciation sets, a warm-up act for the‘ name’ DJ. Not unrelated, Gwyer repeatedly found herself marginalised in a London club scene defined by male promoters and male label-heads, and new gentrified landscapes. How to fight that? Gwyer’s decision was to strip out the layers and the vocals, removing the prohibitive limits of her prescribed personality. Building on the percussive power of her live shows, and informed by the anonymous euphoric energy of those late-night teenage drives, she went on the attack. Using an expanded version of her live set-up – a modern Elektron sequencer and drum-machine, plus such vintage equipment as a Roland JP-8000, a Vermona Mono Lancet, a Moog Mother 32 and a Novation Bass Station – Gwyer has produced a near-conceptual electronic album split between banging “faceless” techno, and weirder, more idiosyncratic pieces that strain against the limits of the genre. Appropriately, the album’s eight tracks are paired as questions and answers. The eerie algorithmic chattering of Why Is There A Long Line In Front Of The Factory? is answered by the stripped-back beats of The Workers Are On Strike, the opening track’s strangeness surviving in the jittery claustrophobic synths and sparking electronic jags that ride the rhythm. Similarly, Why Don’t You Make Your Bed?, a subterranean ride of ancient analogue grooves underpinned by moody Roland shimmers, is answered by It’s Not Worth The Bother, an insouciant gloom-dispelling caper. However, the album’s stand-out centrepiece comes with Why Does Your Father Look So Nervous?, six minutes of frantic dystopian Detroit electro followed by the dynamic acid-squelch rush of He’s Been Teaching Me To Drive. Yet the album’s final pairing, Did You Hear The Owls Last Night?/Yes, But I Didn’t Know They Were Owls, is in many ways Gwyer’s message statement, a machine-tooled dancefloor heartbeat embroidered with glistening detail that bows out on two minutes of wrong-footing rhythms and sci-fi effects. The dialogue is over. Karen Gwyer has failed to bury her weirdness beneath anonymous rhythms. But if the experiment has failed, the end result is a triumph; a latenight drive that starts somewhere in ’90s Michigan but arrives home, in a gloriously disorientating future.