Detrimentalist

WARNING: I'm gonna repeatedly use genre terminology ('breakcore') and use it loosely in this post, so deal with it.

Giving breakcore the serious listen it deserves has been something that for me has been a very long time coming. Without really knowing what it was I'd been briefly exposed in the early aughts - must have been something about hanging out with the computer geek crowd as a high schooler. In more recent years I've been much more acutely aware of the genre's existence, but couldn't really do more than appreciate it's reality-bending qualities and the novelty mindfuck (probably best exemplified by Chris Cunningham's video for Squarepusher's "Come On My Selector"). I didn't really understand how it could be a form of music with much listenability or variation. The breaks themselves were simply too overwhelming and ended up distracting me from being able to notice the details. A pretty big oversight considering this music is, from what I can tell, entirely about the attention to detail.

Even though I tend to favor more danceable electronic music, a good friend of mine piqued my interests again and I figured I'd do things right this time by checking out the latest release by the staple breakcore artist, Venetian Snares. The Canadian native's '08 release Detrimentalist favors moody synth lines to back his breaks over the shimmering sustain of the synths that I've come across in my limited experiences with his other recordings, and makes great use of vocal samples. The ragga intro to 'Eurocore MVP' shows his taste for incorporating a wide range of different styles into his music before jumping into his breaks, which eventually features some hardass vocals that for me really make the track. On the epic ender 'Miss Balaton', VS shows off his ability to use a softer touch with ethereal background synths, strings, and a break that nimbly moves across the track.

All in all, Detrimentalist is a worthwhile album that has happily proved my previous notions about breakcore wrong. Establishing a flow on this kind of album can't be an easy task, and I'd say VS pulls it off reasonably well. Repeat listens, instead of becoming tiresome, make themselves worthwhile by exposing new sounds to digest. And given the sheer volume of stuff that's going on here, I see myself coming back for more on a regular basis. Time to get the rest of the (massive) VS collection of releases.