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Valve 003 2 x 12

Valve 003 2 x 12

a review by gareth metford of
release format Valve 003 2 x 12 by Various Artists (CD Album)

text

More than any other jungle producer - maybe any producer period - Dillinja understands the profound disjunction which exists between the absurdly hopeful entities we often are on an everyday basis, and the fragile, decaying organisms that are our bodies. Much dance music functions to close this gap, to temporarily aggregate the two systems into a single, quasi-organic whole (Deleuze and Guattari's 'desiring machine'). Dillinja's work, however, functions in precisely the opposite manner: by stressing the body's strangeness, its intransigent refusal to adapt itself to human desires, he highlights everything we know, but would like to forget about the awful vulnerability of these squishy packages of flesh, bone, glands etc. upon which our thinking, planning, reasoning selves depend.

Featuring two (possibly three) Dillinja tracks alongside a single contribution from Lemon D, this 12" double pack is not representative of the man's best work. For that one should look to 1994's indescribable 'You Don't Know Remix' on Logic, or more recently, Valve 001's head-snappingly concussive 'Violent Killa'. Unfortunately, since producing the 'Test' series of 12"s, Dillinja's sound has adapted itself somewhat to current trends in drum & bass, taking on something of the stentorian trudge made paradigmatic by producers like Bad Company. Nonetheless, 'D Type' (recorded under the alias Capone) is still capable of demonstrating exactly why Dillinja's work can often be so discomfiting. With its muffled explosions of bass, experienced as a succession of hammer-blows to the chest; its sampled grunts, gurgles and groans, like the insensate murmuring of a dying OAP; its strange tinnitus-like synth whines, this is music which explicitly rejects any idealistic justifications for music-making. 'Creativity' is seen merely as a means by which we distract ourselves from that ceaseless arc towards extinction which we are well aware constitutes the lifespan of any organism.

Which is not to say that this is depressing music: on the contrary, for this listener, Dillinja's fearlessness in confronting certain elemental aspects of embodiment is a welcome escape from the transcendentalist fantasies which dominate many of the discourses around electronic music. 'D Type' is an exhilarating sortie against joyless, incommunicant, apolitical techno-fetishism. That the other tracks here fail to match the impact of its unblinking auto-dissection is simply evidence of the stultifying power of that rhetoric over even such a consummate valoriser of human imperfection as Dillinja. Posted by gareth metford at 00:00, 09 May 2000