Born and raised in South East London and now based in Brighton, IDM/techno producer Pat Hime is certainly used to making frequent runs between his homebase and the capital as part of his duties as a promoter in both cities, and during his regular sojourns as one half of live electronic outfit Idiot Pirate. This six track EP release Plasticine through Rednetic follows on from Hime’s recent debut EP as Patscan on Concrete Plastic and shows him crafting an intricate fusion of emotive melodic elements and furious breakbeats distinctly indebted to mid-nineties UK IDM along the lines of Aphex and The Black Dog; something that certainly sees him sliding in comfortably amongst Rednetic’s established aesthetic.
It’s perhaps late nineties Plaid (just post-TBD split) that opening track ‘Patabula’ evokes most with its strangely calming fusion of skittering, digitally-contorted breakbeats, near-industrial snare hits and floating melodic pads, but while it certainly manages to generate an effective level of finely-detailed atmosphere, it ends up feeling slightly ‘hemmed in’ by the repetitive and unchanging melodic motif that underpins it. Thankfully, the above is a factor that Hime manages to avoid throughout the remainder of this EP. Indeed, there’s a sense that the momentum really begins to build in earnest once the moody ‘Tampered Breaks’ kicks in, its ominous EBM-tinged synths giving way to a fearsome car-crash of violent yet beautifully intricate breakbeat contortion worthy of Mike Paradinas, before dub-tinged downbeat offering ‘Sheen’ offers some respite from the DSP warfare, threading beeping analogue tones through a lazy backdrop of almost classically-tinged synth pads and bubbling rhythmic textures, in a rare moment of calm that sits far closer to Pole’s dubbed-out beatscapes.
‘Slapstik’ meanwhile easily represents this EP’s most wholehearted venture towards the dancefloor, deftly fusing barrages of intricate IDM breakbeat science with dark, rave-tinged electro synths that hint at the looming ghost of nu-skool breaks – indeed, I found it to be easily one of the biggest listening pleasures here as well as the one track I found myself enjoying on more than a purely cerebral level. While the six tracks collected together on Plasticine show Hime operating distinctly within the established boundaries of the IDM genre, there’s certainly plenty of individual character to his productions, with this EP managing to pack in more intriguing moments than many similarly focused full-length releases.
Chris Downton
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