Would we call early grime 12"s centre labels scribbled permanent marker track titles mysterious? & the 2010s goth-techno that reminds us still that the universe is a haunted (ware)house...
Wednesday morning, 8.45am drift // Skirt - In The Meadow Under The Stars
Back in 2010 and ever closing in on the frozen borderline of post-punk/techno, this weeks drift soundtrack has been dug out from my living room record shelves and the long gone wasteland of anonymous whitelabel electronics with claustrophobic, post-punk borrowed project names. Way back then anything cut to a whitelabel, handstamped with a cryptic email address and arriving from that far off land of mystery and intrigue that was Berlin was an instant score. The Frozen Border label was front and centre of our favourite record shops shelves and we’d often dream it had something to do with Hard Wax , Sandwell District, Downwards and many other lost to time techno labels as there were often tracks peppering many a Sandwell District set both online and in real time in the nightclub/nightlands when one of our hero's would visit. In the earliest of Manchester club smoking area's we would occasionally meet various members of the anonymous number station named artists during nights adventures soundtracked by the 2010 industrial & minimal Berghain sound. While two top hometown hero;’s would unleash some of the finest 12"s of that era on Frozen Border and its web of blink-and-miss sub-labels.
Yet for this week, the chapter I've been returning to and poring over is the first Horizontal Ground 12” that dropped the Conet Project style stamped mystery in favour of the artist name and project title, that in a time when some of the earliest operators of this shadowy imprint (was it shadowy or just a pre-internet era label that didn't have a website as it would be cheaper to just buy a rubber stamp, would we call early grime 12"s mysterious as they went one step further than a rubber stamp and just scribbled the track title in permanent marker?) were starting to parody the secrecy with brilliant sounding records that carried faint flickers of the artist names that they were given and framed them in ways that seemed in retrospect to slightly undermine/poke fun at the labels aesthetic and post-punk inspired ambience with more mainstream references (though Nico to be fair recorded many records for major labels) see "The Artist Formerly Known As...". Horizontal Ground 7's In The Meadow Under The Stars by Skirt has been a stark reminder of this era of endless new incredible artist who carried a weight of mystery without being mysterious, and seemed to appear and vanish out of nowhere with cold world electronics that seemed to cross the frozen borderline of records from Type (Grouper), Finders Keepers (Paper Dollhouse) and the Elephant Island minimalism of the finest Hard Wax cuts. The pulsing drone drive of Skirt’s debut Horizontal Ground 12”s title track slowly builds into a deeply unnerving ocean of ice that's sort of like something from Sahko, but echoes a lonely ghosted vocal that dives deeper into the void and in retrospect seems to be a pre-curser to the 2010 drift of early Blackest Ever Black London life sorrow.
This week revisiting the track, it seems to join the lineage of the endlessly evolving on the edge yet returning to its centre strain of drone heavy goth-techno that started Nico's Frozen Border, carried on through Eyeless In Gaza's 1982 masterpiece Letter To Her, and time travelled into the 2010 rainfall of Skirt's In The Meadow Under The Stars, Raime's Eyeless vision Retreat and Space III / Drone 1 by Paper Dollhouse. While Eyeless In Gaza's goth-techno journey ended at Raime, this sound was further explored along the coast in 2011 when Hard Wax legend T++ under the guise of a classic Horizontal Ground hidden numbered artist name remixed Skirt to bridge this microcosm scene/sound into its full circle end when Frozen Border alumni Joe Cocherell & Montalk remixed Paper Dollhouse's Space and Drone transmissions in 2014. Finding myself back on the train soundtracked by Skirt and passing by the meadow, the rest of the 12" drifts between the insomniac construction line gasp of Ikaros and the Berghain after dark set time of Six Hours which adds a thousand yard stare to its time dissolving strings. A true pinnacle of the post-punk/techno goth-drone sound and scene of that 2010 era where you could hear in close proximity an 80s Eyeless In Gaza folk-drone, a 90s Regis industrial hammering and a late 00s Demdike Stare dreamscape mixed into the early 10s Skirt techno shockwaves and Paper Dollhouse’s icy electronics, all infinitely recombined into an endlessly exciting DJ set either in an online mix or in a long since gone nite klub. Skirt’s In The Meadow Under The Stars has allowed the morning moving to work memories and spectres of drone-techno/goth-post-punk seep out of the cracks of 2010s digital files and scattered ashes wax to remind that all these years later the universe is still a haunted (ware)house.
Score Skirt - In The Meadow Under The Stars here »
https://hardwax.com/62299/skirt/in-the-meadow-under-the-stars/