"You have to be thankful for work like Self-Surveillance. Despite the mountains of garbage that are heaped onto us every day, there is still real art."
Much like Carrier’s latest album Rhythm Immortal, A Taut Line’s Self-Surveillance feels impossible to imitate. It’s a seamless mixture of electronics and live elements, something that’s also heard on his label mate BD1982’s work, and a true strong point of their label Diskotopia.
A few tracks on Self-Surveillance remind me of what is arguably Nine Inch Nails’ most cinematic work (and a personal favourite album of theirs), The Fragile. That album came out in 1999, and if someone from the future went back in time to 1999 and told me about 2025, I probably would not have believed them. On paper, 2025 sounds dystopian, and it kind of is, under the right light.
There is an aching in both Self-Surveillance and The Fragile that describes the world in a way that it should not be. In the title track of The Fragile, Trent Reznor tries to convince himself for a moment that everything is actually okay (“We’ll find the perfect place to go where we can run and hide”), but he can’t keep himself from picking at the scab of reality.
On Self-Surveillance, there’s nowhere we can hide from the reality of the present moment. It’s a world where Edward Snowden can blow the lid off of the U.S. surveillance state, and yet there is no resounding revelation from it. Rather, we’ve installed Ring cameras on every corner of our houses. That fact is, in itself, a darker terror than the surveillance state itself.
With all that being said, the album is evocative, to say the least. A Taut Line is a world builder. The opening of “Driass” feels like I’m being dropped into it all, a place that sounds like a bad dream, but it’s the reality.
“The Dark Path” features dramatic pads soaring over a bombastic drum kit. On this track and on “Make Me Whole”, the drums are the hero element. A metallic, overdriven guitar can be heard, similar to Adrian Belew’s mechanised leads on The Downward Spiral.
Distorted speech can be heard here and there, unintelligible and yet recognisable, like the news telling us about some terrible tragedy, or like the announcements an overworked employee might hear on the datacenter floor. These speech patterns can especially be heard on “Free Will Submission”, a title that evokes the struggle of maintaining the vestiges of oneself.
“Overwhelm (It’s Over)” reminds me of the places The Avalanches might go in this darker reality, or the places that Oneohtrix Point Never has been to on Replica. It’s sample-rich and laden with melancholy.
“Ash Beige Boulevard” opens with the unexpected ringing of a phone, like being woken up to do someone else’s bidding, a total submission of the self to this world. The track vacillates between minor and major tremolo-drenched chords. On this track and “Where There’s Hope, There’s Fear”, the drum kits are again the protagonist. The final track is dubby in an all-encompassing way, perhaps reaching the most chilled-out moments of the whole album.
In his final First Floor piece for the year, Shawn Reynaldo wrote: “artists – including DJs, who’ve never been the most intellectual bunch—are increasingly expected to not just have informed opinions on geopolitical conflicts, genocidal actors, AI technology and private equity firms, but to also take ethically coherent action in regard to how those things intersect with the modern music industry…At the same time, it’s hard not to feel like the ‘music’ part of ‘music discourse’ has been largely relegated to the background.”
Shawn’s sentiment here reminded me of the aspects of this world in Self-Surveillance. It’s a world where we’re all pulled in many directions, where we’re told that we must be for this or against that, that these things are part of our identity, and that maybe there’s no other thought we should have besides the sponsored paths that are fed to us. A world where our art is maligned and cheapened for the benefit of the overseers. A world that is obsessed with “content” in lieu of quality work that stands the test of time.
But still, good art exists in this world, like the grass that grows through forgotten patches of asphalt. You have to be thankful for work like Self-Surveillance. Despite the mountains of garbage that are heaped onto us every day, there is still real art.
‘Self-Surveillance’ is out now via Disktopia. Order a copy from Bandcamp.
TRACKLIST
1. Driass
2. The Dark Path
3. Make Me Whole
4. Colours Bleed into Dreams
5. Free Will Submission
6. Overwhelm (It’s Over)
7. Wickstead & Wicken
8. Ash Beige Boulevard
9. Where There’s Hope, There’s Fear