Friday, July 6, 2012

A New (Old?) Brutalism

Love the retro touch of the "embossed label printer" typography on the cover of Perc's A New Brutality


Overlaid on top of that icon of Brutalist Architecture, Trellick Tower.

Do you remember those embossed label printers? I had one. Everyone had one, it seemed like. Then they just disappeared. Bit like slide rules, rendered obsolete by pocket calculators. But I can't recall what it is was that made the embossed label printers obsolete. 
 


And Perc's A New Brutality.... well, judging by the preview below, it sounds a bit like an old brutalism.





(You can hear a longer preview here, along with a bunch of Perc mixes and EPs and what not)

90s hard minimal techno, with touches of industrial and Test Dept in dancefloor mode ("Compulsion"). Stark, ascetic, punitive...   Slaphead-severe;  proper faceless techno bollocks...  at times flashing me back to that 1992-93 London club Knowledge....  a more refined and subdued / slower and less banging take on 80 Aum and Meng Syndicate... 

here's a preview selection from last year's similar Wicker & Steel



the embossed label look has a kind of officialdom / bureaucratic, folders/filing cabinets kind of look that reminds me of that whole side of industrial to do with reports, data, documentation, dossiers...  records in the archival or governmental sense as opposed to musical

see also this Perc Trax artist


love the title here -- "Greyed Out Life"


And "Mandate" !


Does this relate to the H-ological reinvocation of the Public?  institutions and planning bodies and research units dedicated to the welfare of the commonwealth... 

Brutalism, as an architectural school, was part of this current...  the "we know best" paternalism of urban planning and coordinated development

^^^^^^^^^

bonus beat - Test Dept's Compulsion



"test department" itself sounds bureaucratic...

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