Solaris

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Having first made waves with a series of devastatingly audacious hardcore 12"s, Rupert 'Photek' Parkes' inking of a seven-album deal with Virgin provoked much unease amongst his admirers, seeming to portend little but the dilution of his extraordinary talent, while also appearing to betray jungle's guerrilla ethos for the lugubrious mechanisms of corporate 'content provision.' Parkes' popularity among Face-reading urban sophisticates, not to mention his frequent invocation of cool jazz, have similarly tended to horrify those who know that hipsterism is the deadly enemy of everything life-affirming and disobedient about hardcore. Despite career moves such as these, however, Photek's continuing relevance has never been in doubt. Even when Solaris, in large part, abandons drum & bass for mid-tempo breakbeats and coolly formulaic tech-house, Parkes' signature rejection of sentimentality ("the lack of feeling sort of becomes the feeling," he once said) ensures that his work escapes the clammy, moisture-seeking troughs that other de-clawed junglists such as 4 Hero have become mired in.

This does not mean, however, that we should pretend Solaris represents anything other than a holding manoeuvre from an artist whose best work may be behind him. The central problem is not Parkes' shift onto (for him) relatively new generic terrain, but rather that his programming has lost that sense of convolutedness, of impossibly arcane finessings, which made releases like The Seven Samurai and The Hidden Camera feel like transmissions from some unfathomable alien intelligence, as strange and distant as the Pleiades. In comparison to these earlier works, Solaris feels painfully earthbound, altogether too airy. While one can appreciate the onslaught of distorted percussion that is 'Junk,' or the NIN-like synth miasmas of 'Halogen,' the only tracks to really grab one's attention here are 'Can't Come Down' and 'Mine to Give,' both recorded with Chicago house legend Robert Owens. The former revolves around fluttering, lightweight breaks and glacial synth-glide, reminiscent of 1996's T'Raenon EP. The latter is easily the best thing on the album, Owens' distinctively camp stylings alchemising a crisp four-beat loop to produce a splendid club track, its resonant Reese-style bass summoning powerful memories of more than a decade's worth of electronic dance music.

It seems a shame, though, that such success should come at the expense of what brought Photek to our attention in the first place. In his 1997 Wire article on neurofunk, '2 Steps Back,' Simon Reynolds wrote that "listening, you can hear the conditions under which the music came into being: bodies rigid with tension as they click the mouse; eyes fucked by the red eye effects of ganja and staring at a computer screen all day." Reynolds saw such labour-intensive practices as propelling drum & bass towards the absolute anality of the purist techno scene, squeezing out all of its jump-up juice. A track like Photek's 'Ni - Ten - Ichi - Ryu,' however, proves that this need not be the case: the sheer weight of accumulated sonic detail instead produces a near-sublime sense of lift-off, of becoming a minor component in some unfeasible technical apparatus, travelling at light-speed to destinations unknown. Now that it appears Rupert Parkes has left all that behind, Solaris at least serves to remind of us of what once was.