Regardless of the four releases he put out last year on outlets such as L.I.E.S. and The Trilogy Tapes, Oliver Vereker counts among the partisans of discretion. Quite prolific yet moving apart from groups and scenes, the man turns off from today’s techno zeitgeist with a unique and challenging stance. This time, he’s back to deliver a first release on Berceuse Heroique, a label that fits with perfection his droney techno ventures.
‘Flesh and Blood‘ is the best example of Vereker’s shuffling own brand of sound, straight in the vein of his ‘Disconnect‘ track from the Rosite EP. As it juggles with chopped-up, industrial rhythms doped on a hefty dose of sub-bass gush, Murder License bifurcates to noisey extents in a flash. Take ‘Event Horizon‘, composed along with French producer Low Jack under their LJV moniker: it unfurls like a hellish strip of gargling machines and windy screeching that eventually reveals in its purest, unpolished shape and matter on the whirring no man’s land of ‘Bedroom Jihad‘.
Showing the same one shot, risk-it-all approach that could be felt on each release he put out to date, Vereker is proving yet again an undeniable sense for crafting deep textures and saturated, grungy sceneries in the guttiest way. As daring as can be, the record feels like the urban sonic version of a lifeless mangrove swamp. Expanding its roots into leftfield loam while raising its metallic foliage up to industrial heights, the EP quietly finds its place somewhere between Adam X and the darkest material of Thomas Köner.
Tough and flinty, the record doesn’t constitute an end per se. It’s a stone added to a ruined edifice, a last spark flitting over an extinguished fire. Still, it is a move, a gesture, a human primal scream translated in binary codes. And in the end, it makes no doubt that this Murder License is a class act of musical and artistic resistance.
Discover more about Vereker and Berceuse Heroique on Inverted Audio.