Simian Mobile Disco's Unpatterns Was A Vital Statement About Loss And Despair
The 2012 release from the shape shifting electronic duo highlights their most potent and affecting work
Tristan Young @talltristan
The Spectrum of electronic music, and its increasingly diffuse sub genres, is daunting. The enormity of the gulf between ambient to EDM, experimental to electropop is vast and holistic waypoints are at times obtuse and indiscernible. Luckily, if one was to attempt a rudimentary yet fairly comprehensive tour of the genre as a whole, Simian Mobile Disco is an essential guide through the myriad facets of electronic music. They’ve done it all. What started with epileptic bangers in their monstrous debut in ADSR morphed into dance hall collabs in Temporary Pleasures. Spastic flourishes of earlier work gave way to the subdued ambiences of Whorl. Its ponderous approach evolved into auteur techno with Welcome to Sideways. At one point or another SMD has populated nearly every constellation in the cosmos of electronic music, to varying degrees of success and failure. At times it has felt aggressively earnest, at others gimmicky.
Nestled deep into the middle of their discography is 2012’s Unpatterns, an exploration into the delphic morass of deep soul tech house. Overlooked and underrated, Unpatterns marked SMD’s deepest dive into the core of their talents. It was the album that was ostensibly the simplest, but had by far the most to say. Whereas so much of their music speaks to and communicates via sensation, sensory inputs and outputs, and chemistry, Unpatterns is steeped in genuine emotion and feeling. Indeed, more so than a great many of its past and future contemporaries, Unpatterns- in the composition of a classical DJ set- is an album about the pressures of anxiety and succumbing to that pressure. It ponders the pernicious and numbing effect of desire, loss and heart break, how it can desensitize us to so much of our life, save for the searing and delirious theatricality of those moments when it all falls apart. Art, in it’s more laborious and thematic forms, has never been constructed of desires and needs being met, but of the opposite- a void of fulfilment. In Unpatterns SMD found what was in that void and transcribed it, as best as they could.
Techno, in generalist terms, is constructed from loops and patterns. As the cycles are augmented, layered, and reconstituted through different sonic elements, songs begin to emerge. This is the basic audio acumen of how SMD approach Unpatterns, however they double down on the looping state of mind aspect. This leads for sequences of pronounced monotony, at least on a theoretical level. ‘A Species Out of Control’ and ‘Interference’ is a perpetual continuation of the same sequence. However, they are both master classes in communicating notions of intense pressure and unease. The first few iterations of ‘A Species Out of Control’ do indeed seem like a standard of spritely digitized beats. A snarling and vicious base line stalks the background, but the distance seems safe enough. As the song progresses the output of the quixotic melody builds, but not to the intensifying extent of the base. It isn’t a case of switching the volumetric dynamics, but rather an unmitigated torrent of pressure systems, building on top of each other. It’s nerve racking. ‘Interference’ takes a single oscillating sine wave and renders it through gradually stranger and more severe synthesisers. The swings between the resonate pulses grow more pronounced and unstable. By the end the same benign structure becomes one of psychotic design (pro tip- hunt down the version of this track from their 2013 live record where they bust out a damn Theremin).
Else where in ‘Pareidolia’ SMD hide the truest manifestation of an actual beat within layers of sonic minutia. Subtle builds that hint at fevered passion keep disintegrating pre drop, it’s elevation growing more tense with each iteration only for a droning siren to knock it all down. It is a laborious sequence with seemingly little function, a proverbial bridge to nowhere. After the fourth or so cycle we actually reach the core- the melody. Underneath all that fizzling beige is a staggeringly triumphant and exclamatory climax of a melody. By obfuscating its charisma in something so sterile ‘Pareidolia’ accentuates it’s best strength. That it places its one true moment of engaged discovery right at the end is appropriate; it needed to be as far away from the towering sense of loss that defines much of this album.
Unpatterns has no actual lyrics. What it does have in luxurious abundance are several bespoke vocal samples. Some have none, the ones that do only have one. They are at once sparing and gratuitous, for the ones that do employ the tactic do so to considerable extent. Their connotation, implementation, and saturation is brilliantly designed. Their purpose is indelibly clear. Album opener, ‘I Waited for You’, says exactly and only that, over and over. Tuned to a worn out and exhausted automaton, one who’s decayed audio implies a sorrowfully long existence, ‘I Waited for You’ is one of the most unwaveringly sullen songs in all of electronic music. The debilitating moans of some half sentient being, reduced to only one hollowed out state of being communicates so much about loss, heart break, and pain. It’s mixture with hypnotic swells of baroque synth makes for a poetic statement about that pain.
The gorgeously ornate and opulent ‘Seraphim’ employs similar sentiments. However instead of rendering them through rueful and introverted anguish, it blasts it from the roof top with operatic melodrama. Sampling Beatles alumni Cila Black and her song ‘It’ll Never Happen Again’, the only spoken phrase in ‘Seraphim’ is, “why can’t you be where I want you to be?” The debilitating sense of unrequited love is palatable. The extravagance and magnitude of the rapturous synth, bursting through the gaps left by the vocal samples provides a genuine shock and awe kind of moment. The vocal sample is dialed all the way from detuned murmurs up to a truly theatrical tenor. No one is even really singing in this song, and yet you wish you could respond to her. To it. In being unable to do so that sense of loss and unfulfillment is transferred from the music into the listener. It’s cruel, but it’s honest.
Elsewhere in Unpatterns, vocal samples continue to be used to great effect. After the hallucinogenic and interrogative stress of the middle sequence, ‘Put Your Hands Together’ takes on an séance like, incantatory verve. The track’s eponymous lyrics, set atop dizzying sequencers and hypnotic propulsion intimates the idea of cult or religion as an escape from the rest of the album’s turmoil. It is manipulative and compelling, supplanting intellectual rigor for an enticing body high. The only overtly pop like song is ‘Your Love Ain’t Fair’ and in it they take once again a very simple sample, but this time bring it to life in dazzling ways. While ‘Your Love Ain’t Fair’ is yet another monotonous song the modulation of the key phrase is expansive. Synth with audacious and overtly tingling trails prop up beautiful and multi vector augmentation of the sample to the point where it sounds like this could actually be a person singing.
Oddly enough, or perhaps in making a rhetorical point through highlighting its antithesis, the least monotone track- the most organically progressive- is also the one that throws you for a spin the most. In the abnormal ‘The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife’ a sporadic and ill defined drum line leaves ample room for asymmetrical synth droplets to come and go seemingly at random. Its lack of sequential order signifies some kind of algorithmic breakdown of the Unpattern’s internal logic. If this is a story of loss and desire, the story seems to get lost here- unless that’s exactly the point. Suffer enough emotional trauma, and beyond even numbing oneself to the details of the world, sheer dementia is perhaps a final destination (see Kevin Barnes in ‘The Past is a Grotesque Animal’). For this sequence Unpatterns stops being mournful or over bearing, just strange- and oddly indulgent in this regard. It’s at once a bizarrely pronounced moment of respite and also a harrowing preview of the deepest known point down the rabbit hole.
It’s hard to get a sense of things like taste and approachability deep down in those psychic chasms. By all accounts Unpatterns is a decidedly unapproachable album. Considered by some to be too strange at times, and bland at others. That misses the point of it’s thesis I would argue. Unpatterns was meant to explore the tangible, or at least conceivable, interpretations of disappointment and let down. It is not an experience of pop highs or catharsis, and rejects the compositional approaches that propagate such conceits. Art exists along side of us and vice versa, which means- like everything else- we have to live with being upset with it, even confused by it. Unpatterns thought there could be an aberrant beauty within that idea. It’s in there somewhere.