Sheffield-born and now South London-based, electronic producer Nigel Truswell has previously released tracks as Alkin Engineering and WG Machines on a slew of labels, including the esteemed Static Caravan imprint, Unlabel and October Man Recordings. This debut album as Oberman Knocks represents the first release on Andrea Parker’s Aperture label, and certainly kicks things off nicely for a label apparently dedicated to the more experimental, abstract regions of electronic music. Perhaps the most apt description of the ten tracks collected here would be dark IDM, with much of the sonic palette here being constructed around dark drones, contorted, digitally-processed industrial breakbeats and the occasional fragment of cut-up, unintelligibly yelled vocals – indeed, Truswell apparently restricts himself to a comparatively stripped-back studio set-up, using only a minidisc recorder, cheap mic and three pieces of software.
While the Sheffield-based comparison is an all too easy one, the most obvious influential touchstone here is frequently Autechre at their most atonal, austere and nasty, with the skittering, steel-plate edged complex breakbeats and detuned synthetic drones of opener ‘Bronic’ and ‘Lackey Remand’ calling to mind the more confrontational edges of the duo’s ‘Confield / Draft 7.30’ period. Perhaps most noticeably however, it’s the unrelentingly dark nature of these seemingly airless tracks that perhaps strikes the attention most – with the gasped, strangled vocal fragments seeming to grab for oxygen amidst the unsettling textures, and further adding to the doomy sense of atmosphere generated. File under ‘uneasy listening’; ’13th Smallest’s is likely to appeal most to fans of dark noise-laden IDM along the lines of the Ad Noiseam and Tympanik Audio labels.
