Middlesborough, UK duo Perfume Advert (Aaron Turner and Tom Brown) pairs deep, crawling techno abstractions with sandy textures and subliminal, blurry synth lines to create new hybrid dance sonics that drift and fade like mirages on the horizon. Born out of this past July’s genuinely hot UK Summer in the tiny upstairs room of a small town house, early experimentations with sweaty 110BPM house beats led to the “Tulpa” cassette – nine completely live recordings of haze-worshipping ambient techno with a backbone of slow-growing, demented house grooves.
The very much one-shot approach (with very little in the way of post production) to textural techno and house sees the dark and murky signifiers that are now perhaps identifiably “outsider house” insist on moving forward with a deep, analogue warmth. The super thick haze of field recordings and noisy (but subtly melodic) textures that back the main Korg ESX-1 powered grooves; lead tracks “Rotted Out” and “Lampers” wobble with a vivid, Sci-Fi imagination as much as a proclivity for warped club grooves. Mechanic rhythms carry the tapes’ overall fantasy atmosphere that is based as much off heavy gamer dreamscapes as much as J.G. Ballard’s or H.P. Lovecraft’s sense of the grotesque.
“Tulpa” is indebted to the ultra-realized stark/bleak oblique dance worlds of Andy Stott, Basic House, Raime, Tim Hecker and Huerco S., but the psychoactive mood that leaks out of Perfume Advert’s vivid amorphous world is clearly the product of two close friends converging in all the right places. Using shortwave radio, Abelton and various effects, Tom Brown’s drones and textures crossed borders into Turner’s slacker funk with a surprisingly freedom in just a month or so of jamming.
Turner’s solo, fog-obsessed work as //Ama took an overtly British post-dubstep approach to the hauntologic but still felt strongly rhythmic, the potent grooves that wriggle out of Perfume Advert’s abstracted, texture-drenched techno are never bogged down in the murky dreamscapes that fill them out.
| A1 | Lampers | 6:34 |
| A2 | Rotted Out | 3:21 |
| A3 | Sand Worm | 6:45 |
| A4 | Makuta | 2:57 |
| B1 | Wades | 2:32 |
| B2 | Swamp Star | 4:24 |
| B3 | The Drowned World | 2:47 |
| B4 | Death Bed | 3:40 |
| B5 | Tulpa | 5:43 |
