Luke Abbott - Holkham Drones

LUKE ABBOTT - HOLKHAM DRONES

Border Community

Holkham Drones is an odd title. For start, the album seems markedly lacking in vanilla drones, coda Dumb apart. Maybe the title is a reference to ther residents of the otherwise charming Norfolk market town of Holkham, going about their daily lives in drone-like ignorance of the experimental techno being cooked up in their very midst by a - possibly - local resident. It’s their loss, because Holkham Drones is an intriguing and rewarding album.

As with many releases on Border Community, it defies easy pigeonholing beyond the impossibly vague (“experimental techno”?). The first track, “2nd 5th Heavy”, might resemble Manuel Göttsching’s E2-E4 cut down to a 3-minute edit, but the second, “Swansong”, is a slice of swinging electronica. Following this, Whitebox is a wobbly techno anthem in the vein of BC’s most famous single release, The Sky Was Pink. Somehow though, this scatter-gun approach hangs together, perhaps  because the sonic palette is so pleasantly consistent. There is a vintage analogue warmth to all of the tracks, the kind that only comes from synth nerds with extensive Boards of Canada record collections.

Here lies the first potential hurdle for Holkham Drones to cross. Even on first listen the influences seem plain - BoC, Four Tet, and to some extent Tangerine Dream to pick a random few. But the album is derivative in the kindest possible sense. “Derived from” does not always mean “blatant plagiarism” - and it’s impossible to accuse any track of that. “Trans Forest Alignment” may use BoC-borrowing synth waves but for the first minute or so it sounds not unlike a electric shaver malfunctioning over a cod-disco hi-hat beat (unfortunately it’s as irritating as that sounds).

The album highlights are the more dancefloor-oriented parts: the aforementioned Whitebox, the unfolding psychedelic groove of “Hello Tazelaar”, and “Soft Attacks”, a mind-melting fluffy cosmic trip you may recognise from the DJ-Kicks mix by Abbott’s label boss. I imagine these all sound pretty spectacular when performed live, something I certainly plan to see at the first opportunity.

On the flip side, some of the beats can seem a little lazy, even when masked by IDM trickery. “Brazil” in particular recalls a preset bossa nova or something and it rapidly outstayed its welcome. But this is a minor point: more annoying is the brutally short cut-off on some of the tracks. The excellent 2nd 5th Heavy may sound a bit like Göttsching but he was brave (or stupid) enough to stretch his great idea out for an hour. Holkham Drones is always keen to move on to the next experiment, even if it’s less successful, which is a shame.

However, it’s a good sign if your main criticism is that an album should have been longer, so I can fully recommend this one. Holkham Drones is an album of real quality which benefits from repeated listening, especially on a decent system or a good set of headphones. Buy it. Especially if you live in Holkham.

Sam Stagg

Disclaimer: Between the ages of eleven and fourteen I was a very minor member of my school orchestra in the rural Midlands. One of the pieces we performed was arranged by James Holden, a precocious musical genius a couple of school years above me, already on the way to becoming the globe-straddling experimental techno behemoth he is today. I mention this not merely to name-drop or exaggerate but to point out that James Holden likes Holkham Drones so much that he released it on his label. And if the opinion (and artistic and financial commitment) of a musical genius is not enough, this was the take of a 3rd clarinet who once poorly parped one of his early works.