Barcode E-zine: Valentine
Certainly a more cultured album than Zak Roberts’s previous excursions into heavy breakcore, Valentine breaks down the fury of The Cursed Species (2004) to focus on a much deeper and more challenging concept. When the pace of music is slower, the listener has more elbow room to focus on moods and atmospheres and pick apart the production, and through dissection Roberts proves that there is certainly a lot more creativity and maturity to his sound nowadays. Yet Valentine remains a deeply dark and sinister experience – made obvious by the opening vocal prose of No Brakes, which then evolves into a sprawling mass of spiralling analogue synthesis, mixed with bludgeoned beats, piano tones and staccato, bleached vocals. The following, You Are Mine, follows a similar trend, with Morrocan-sounding percussion; the ghostly vocals reminiscent to that used by the likes of Akira Rabelais. Mingi is excellent, if not a little repetitive, but Roberts makes a great job of sample stitching bizarre noise effects together to create steamy, oppressive Bladerunner atmospherics. Much of Valentine flits between this type of track and progressive dub-heavy, almost trip-hop oriented rhythms. The likes of Nefertiti Dub and Two Hammers are enjoyably nightmarish and haunting, oozing with creaking, groaning synths and taunting, spliced vocals – this is serial killer music. Hungry is also tempting, with its mesmerising, winding analogue synth surrounded by breathy vocals, whilst Raining Glass a more complex affair, with big breaks pelted by bristling, dense machine music, the album increases in complexity and intensity as it approaches its end. Valentine is a deeply dark, yet challenging album, taking the breakcore genre into a subtly imaginative, dreamlike universe that has been explored by relatively few to date.
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