The underground, for the acute lack of a better term, is in the throes of an industrial/Goth revisitation. In the indie/noise zone there’s the ▲-worshipping witch house groups (oOoOO, Salem, White Ring, Holy Other, etc.) and the coldwave folks (Wierd Records, Cold Cave, Xeno & Oaklander, Silk Flowers, etc.), as well as charming oddities like Zola Jesus and Sex Worker, who enjoy drifting around classification. In the techno and dubstep realms, meanwhile, a slew of producers are also busy dusting off their demonia boots (just a joke). There’s the Sandwell District/Downwards family: Silent Servant, Regis, Function and Female, plus their many related side-projects, most of which — Tropic of Cancer, The Grave Lady, Sandra Electronics, Dva Damas, Collin Gorman Weiland, Six Six Seconds and some others — eschew dancefloor groove research for electronic post-punk, with an unambiguous emphasis on punk. Then there’s the post-everything duo Demdike Stare, whose records contain about as many esoteric references as the collected works of Eliphas Lévi.

Generally speaking, the indie/noise folks are overtly retro. A band like Cold Cave wears its influences on its sleeve so proudly that calling them a nostalgia act wouldn’t be inaccurate, or insulting, really. The techno/dubstep peeps, in contrast, are more about cultivating a balance between engaging what came before and nose-diving into the future’s chilly waters. They are robust modernists, with one eye slyly focused on the rear-view mirror. Function’s Variance 1-3 12″, to cite but one example, feels intensely current and of-the-now, yet a palpably musty doom-n-gloom haunts its stripped-down, abstract rhythms. It’s a rusted specter of the despair and brooding that courses through Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft, Cabaret Voltaire, Portion Control, Throbbing Gristle and other dystopian visionaries.

All of this leads us to Ramie’s debut slab of wax for the label Blackest Ever Black (a nomenclature that weeps GOTH). The Raime EP stalks the solemn antechambers linking dubstep, minimal techno (think Emptyset, TV Victor) and dark ambient. I’ve read numerous comparisons to Sandwell District and Demdike Stare. They are valid, definitely. Raime’s productions, however, feel more nostalgic. The duo, because of this, shares much in common with witch house and coldwave throwbacks, significantly more than most musicians from a dubstep/techno background share. The lead track, aptly titled “Retread,” is a nonchalant update of the late-1980s intersection of Goth, industrial and the Middle Ages. Remove the obsidian splashes of dubby bass and claustrophobic compression, both of which help hold together the choral-like vocal effects, and there’s not much difference between Raime and the new-age electronica of Enigma, or The Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos for that matter. And just to be clear: this is not a put down; I dig the record.

On the EP’s latter two tracks, “This Foundry” and the strikingly spooky ” We Must Hunt Under The Wreckage Of Many Systems,” Raime raises anchor and sets sail for less surveyed waters. In the process, their sound turns impressionistic, less rooted in history. The voices on “Retread” continue their funereal chants, but they’re now dissolving, crumbling and clipping. They’re becoming creatures of rhythm. Bass and drums follow suit, embracing “the tribal” more or less: (1) a cooing union of humidity, metal and bamboo, and (2) the tar-flaked remains of Jon Hassell’s Fourth World Volume Two: Dream Theory in Malaya. That said, drums and bass, while multiplying during their decay, are still producing nothing more than a plod. Super low- frequencies do exist, and they create a base-level atmosphere — vibrating fields rather than a throbbing nexus of discrete coordinates. Raime, outside of these scant components, employs little else. We’re talking serious austerity.

When I first started spinning this 12″ I thought its three tracks would sound better broken up and worked into mixes, but I’ve since gone back on this. The Raime EP is a solid listen in and of itself. To listen to these three tracks consecutively is to witness negative space — a dead blackness caked to the duo’s skeletal  and severely compressed arrangements — slowly eat-away at sound.

And ironically enough, the most consumed track of the three, that last one, “We Must Hunt Under The Wreckage Of Many Systems,” is also the most engaging and alive.

Raime on Discogs.

On the other two Perc titles I’m currently dry-humping — the hellish/thick Monad V, released via the Stroboscopic Artefacts label, and Vertigo One, a collection of remixes, including a pair from Milton Bradley, who himself is a beast — Perc is in construction mode. The producer erects industrial grooves as dense, mammoth and rumbling as mining machinery. He’s a lot like Ancient Methods in that respect.

On the “Antifunk” / “Purple” twelve-inch, however, Perc opts for deconstruction. Instead of blowing-out the basic components of 1980s dancefloor industrial (battering-ram drum machines, dystopian robo-synths and the clanging cacophony of grease-stained men whacking archaic plumbing with massive monkey wrenches), he grinds them into severely minimal abstractions. The low-end murk that’s so much a part of Monad V and Vertigo One is nowhere to be heard. This allows the concentrated power embedded in these components to emerge. The beats are still humongous, of course, but their taught and rather wiry, too.

“Antifunk” is anything but — at least to those of us who find funk in such exquisitely inhuman music. The kickdrum bounces hard; the hi-hats, meanwhile, spit barbed static at intervals that are tightly regulated. What’s cool is just how traditional this track is in terms of honoring the industrial form. At first blush, Perc’s radical manipulations are the first qualities I latched on to — modern music, modern times. Yet he very cleverly keeps “Antifunk” tethered to its industrial history, specifically the Portion Control / Krupps / Fad Gadget zone circa ’85.* The most overtly industrial touches are the hammer-to-anvil percussion and the clipped human breaths, both of which pass through a faint dubby ether on occasion.

“Purple” is the funkier of the two, actually. It’s also more engaging. Where “Antifunk” follows a fairly basic narrative (build > breakdown > build again), its flipside is a tug-of-war, one that never resolves itself, between turmoil and an eerie tranquility. The two extremes just kind of stalk each other in precarious stalemate. The cowbells, big, of course, stutter uneasily; they also seem to multiply vertically as the track progresses. The kickdrum, while powerful and surefooted, isn’t without its flagrant lapses in duty. Concurrently, waves of gothic synths, an uncanny tonic I suppose, float like wraiths over the near-chaos underneath them. At midway point, all action dissolves, this just long enough for a compacted orgy of human breaths and moans to emerge. They wind up hanging around ’til party’s end.

It’s funny. Whenever I finish pulverizing myself with this 12″ I sit back and with ears ringing, begin waxing philosophic on the nebulous nature of genre classification, something Perc brutally dismisses with these two more-than-sturdy tracks, both of which possess the fundamentals of techno and industrial. Very cool.

Perc on Discogs.

Notes
*If you crave your industrial retro-style, then check out the killer Peter Van Hoesen mix over at Promo Mixes. The guy covers a lot of ground: Skinny Puppy, Fad Gadget, The Human League, Liaisons Dangereuses, even early Simple Minds.