Review Summary: Skee Mask's spare tapes vs. the Russian government
Skee Mask landed one of 2021’s greatest highlights with his IDM-techno-breakbeat-etc. colossus
Pool, and now anyone done digesting that record’s seemingly unending spread of quality tracks can line up for fresh helpings thanks to
A and its spontaneous release. Just don’t be tempted to treat it as a true follow-up: where
Pool was practically woven together as its own immersive pocket of reality,
A scans as a concerted non-statement, from its slapdash pacing to its deadpan anti-title. This is understandable given that it’s an album-shaped compilation of unreleased tracks, but there’s no need to dismiss it as such from the outset: there’s a generous share of strong material here, enough to warrant a couple of holistic dives even if the listener’s scope will likely end up as compilatory as the album’s (mini-mixes of highlight tracks = yes encouraged).
Sequencing discontinuity aside, there are recurrent themes here: Skee Mask’s twinkling synthlines and sparse soundscapes play a lesser role than on
Pool and 2018’s
Compro, by which I think it’s also fair to say that they’re simply less developed. These tracks are mostly beat-heavy and heavy in their beats, though the early highlight “DIY Letterbox” is a notable exception in its distantly Boards of Canada-esque collage of ambient glitches, skittering IDM percussion and soothing piano flourishes. Immediately setting a more representative template, the opener “Driver” is energised and refined in its midtempo breakbeat, its booming four-to-the-floor kick teasing a dual identity as an upbeat techno song in a classic exhibition of Skee Mask’s genre fluidity. It’s cohesive and clever as an ice-breaker, but the following “Korarchaeota” proves less successful in its anxious glitch and pounding beats: Skee Mask’s dry choice of snare tone is somewhat grating here, for which we’ll blame the album’s unmastered release, but the track smacks more widely of a promising stylistic exercise that never ties itself round into a satisfying compositional form or evocative atmosphere in the way Skee Mask usually has such a subtle knack for. The same goes for “BFIB”, “At Play” and the meandering “Birdland Skit”: all ostensibly well-constructed but both overly circuitous and a smidge short of flavour. “Plastix A.W.” almost falls into the same camp, but there’s something tactile and kinetic to its beat that suggests a viable dance banger. The album highlight arrives midway in the one-two combo of “Msynth Patterns”, a mesh of squelching bass and restless breaks that brings to mind the most edge-of-your-seat cuts from
Syro-era Aphex Twin, and “Msynth Dub”, an eight-minute breakbeat gauntlet that warps through innumerable contours and collisions in a deft foil to even the most enfeebled attention spans. These two tracks carry a distinctly harder edge to
Compro or
Pool’s palettes, but while their exclusion seems reasonable, any casual Skee Mask enthusiasts can count them as essentials.
Overall,
A is a delightful surprise but confusing to distil into a comprehensive impression: its tracks are individually strong enough to rise above the means-to-the-end implications of their abrupt release, originally pitched to drum up humanitarian aid for the Ukraine war, but there’s a nagging sense of something piecemeal and uneven that creeps out of its sequencing and ruptures the illusion that this could have amounted to something more than a grab-bag of outtakes and spare ends. Perhaps this is an unfair criticism for something that was never envisioned as such, but it’s testament to Skee Mask’s calibre that his apparent bottom drawer can almost posit a wholesale album in its own right.
