Emptyset

Album Info

     

This is the debut full-length release by Bristol, UK production duo, Emptyset. An empty set is an empty box or an empty bag. It's not the same as nothingness. Aesthetically, it implies structure without content; absolute potential without manifestation. This works as a template for listening to the record: it sounds like dance music with the guts ripped out; the vengeful ghost of a techno future generated entirely from noise and sine waves. There are no melodic lines on which to hitch a free ride; your attention is required at all times to safeguard against total disorientation. Emptyset is a Brutalist structure, a foreign universe born out of a void, becoming sentient and condemned to await demolition.

You need not have studied Jung or harbor any particular psycho-geographical leanings to recognize that a drawn-out process of smashing a city's urban heart to pieces might influence its art. With the extensive reconstruction of its city center, at one point the biggest building site in Europe, Bristol has been a site of dereliction and mass demolition for the last decade. This upheaval, which has seen tons of girders, beams and aggregates destroyed, is just another episode in the city's tradition of lo-frequency exploration. Mass slavery, bass culture, tape hiss in the lo-fi bedsit tradition, Georgian splendor bombed to smithereens in WWII; all these dehumanized visions subsequently informed everything from the building of an extensive network of underground slave tunnels to the creation of tower block living rooms; lo-frequencies shook the earth and noise filled the air.

Bass is the tool, the machine-head used to explore cracks, find spaces, open them up and fill them with noise. As a direct consequence, Bristol is the only city that could produce this album. With its dialogues in play between techno, dubstep, drone and avant-garde electronics, the environment of grassroots cultural cooperation serves to destabilize the boundaries between the grammars of individual genres.