Defunkt Dialekt is a resident of Birmingham, England, and has always been actively anti-pop, releasing wav-format music for free on his Soundcloud, as well as releasing a free self-titled EP at French web label Bedroom Research.
Defunkt Dialekt has now released his first 12″ – entitled Clockworks – via his label Irritational Media Society. Since its release, it has nearly sold out of its 300-odd copies, quite an achievement for niche electronica such as this, especially a first release with no big names attached to it.
This is possibly due to the scope of lead A-side ‘Beyond The Clockwork Horizon’. This is narrative electronica at its finest, a composition of epic magnitude. it starts off with eerie reverberating stringy-sounding keys that break into full, sweeping electric mid-range bass, taking no prisoners. It glitches and morphs into a driving synth melody, building into a multi-layered twist of electronic melodies, before dropping back into yet another driving melodic structure. The track keeps decomposing and reassembling in this exotic and entropic fashion, maintaining overall progression rather than seeming like half-formed ideas. After ‘Beyond the Clockwork Horizon’ subsides, you’ve felt like you’ve run a psychedelic marathon through the very personal landscape of Defunkt Dialekt’s mind.
Easily one of the finest tracks I’ve heard this year.
Defunkt Dialekt’s Dub Malfunction and ¬a]e o¬e remixes of ‘Beyond The Clockwork’ brings two unique whirlwinds of click and glitch into different spectrums of steady percussion, ebbing and towing in complex time arrangement.
B-side ‘265677’ builds progressionally in this same low-fi seething glitch surrealism, defragmenting sound structure into endless chaotic scope. Some higher-pitch sounds that are thrown around are extremely discomforting to listen, but are acceptable within Clockwork’s context. The Dub Malfunction runs even more complex, before guest Valance Drakes offers a spacious and reverberating outro to compliment the tightly controlled psychosis of Defunkt Dialekt’s tunes.
Clockworks is not for the meek, and potentially one of the most interesting listens I’ve had since Autechre broke the scene. This album is rapidly running out of copies in 12″ format, but has been scheduled for digital release shortly.
