Raime - Raime EP

Blackest Ever Black is a new London-based label that seeks to re-establish electronic music as a poetic, provocative and emotionally inquisitive force. Music by artists, not engineers.

Its first release is a self-titled EP by Raime, a British duo who draw explicit inspiration from the marginal mavericks of early European goth, industrial and synth wave - artists largely omitted from the current master narrative of post-punk history, and who strove to make music at once cerebral and visceral, futuristic and atavistic. Well-versed in the language of club music, but rejecting its typically rigid sequencing and arrangements, Raime use technology pensively - to convey a sense of crisis, collapse and longing. Transporting and disorienting though their work might be, it's narratively taut and has no truck whatsoever with the "cosmic"; it's too aggressive and engaged to be called psychedelic.

'Retread' floats spectral plainchant across a ruthlessly pared-down, reverb-heavy drum pattern and sub-bass summoned from the deepest crypt, before unfolding into a gripping coda of suffocated woodwind, disembodied howls and billowing, baleful sheets of melody. 'This Foundry' threatens groove but never quite yields to it, its hypnotic, low-slung rhythm and eerily decaying bass sound disrupted by strafing synths and a swell of vocal textures alternately celestial and guttural.

BLACKEST002, due out in November, will feature a remix of this track by Regis (Sandwell District / Downwards). A huge, martial drum tattoo dominates 'We Must Hunt Under The Wreckage Of Many Systems', the yawning space between hits striped with drones that conjure hostile pre- and post-human landscapes. The track's dark, ritualistic momentum will make sense to fans of dubstep and jungle, but the dread it evokes is singular and oblique. BLACKEST001 is a trio of bold, original essays in unease, and a welcome sign that the post-techno avant-garde is alive, angry and untethered to the dancefloor, academy or gallery space. Music for hard times.

Tracklisting:

A1 Retread  
A2 This Foundry
B1 We Must Hunt Under The Wreckage Of Many Systems

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