Review: Egg Meat – S/T

Released on Alien Jams.

A terrific 18-minute act of reality dislocation from collaborators Tooth Rust (aka Laurel Uziell) and Georgie McVicar. Club-derived electronic loops form descendent steps upon which the words of poet Danny Hayward play runaway slinky, phonemes cascading into themselves via vari-sped delays, abetting the journey down into corporeal disentanglement. The voice is not so much a topper to the instrumentation as an analogue to them: the uncanny renderings, the sense of rebelling against their own shape. Beats hang in stalled explosions, scattered hi-hat shrapnel, cold hard thumps, recognisable as rhythms but also violently atomised, ultimately giving the whole thing a “blackout in a nightclub” vibe. The music becomes larger and verges on the visible. Other bodies are present only in theory. Any potential for communal euphoria is inverted into a hyperreal loneliness – the thickness of the dark, coupled with the realisation that any human-to-human connection is just a cluster of impressions on the senses, the touch of another’s hand a mere synchronicity of warmth and pressure, the voice its own isolated vibration, aligned puppet-like with the visible motions of muscles and body parts.

Hayward slurs and blurs, speaking with the slow deliberation of someone trying to stay calm and “recount exactly what happened”, carefully extracting a single strand of language from multidirectional splays of thought. The voice enunciates but the mind is elsewhere. Without a steady beat to depend on (with the exception of the techno pulse of “Climate And Resilience”, which ironically feels untrustworthy in its pretence of stability) he slackens into the absences between hits, poured like milk among the percussive punches. “Some ephemeral bird”, “adjacent”, “what sings over there”…continually, Hayward references something that resides to the left of the thing they are grasping at, while the surrounding beats also hang as cryptic, pattern-wracked signifiers for something else.