Porter Ricks - Shadow Boat EP

Pitchfork 80

Porter Ricks, the duo of Andy Mellwig and Thomas Köner, weren’t around for long, but they left an indelible stamp on the legacy of what came to be known as dub techno. Ironically, there was never very much dub in their work—not in the way that you could hear it ricocheting through the work of their colleagues Basic Channel, for instance, upon whose Chain Reaction label Porter Ricks released their debut album, in 1996. In Basic Channel’s music, dub is a root, transplanted from Jamaica, that will eventually branch into the full-scale reggae of their later Rhythm & Sound project. In Porter Ricks’ music, dub is less a root than a route, a way of tracing the path a sound can travel through the convoluted guts of the recording studio.

In Porter Ricks’ short, largely bulletproof catalog—save for a few exploratory detours on their second album, into hip-hop and Chicago house, that probably would have been better left untaken—drum machines are run through maze-like circuits until nothing remains but the infrared signature they have left in their wake. Their commitment to conjuring whole worlds out of little more than crackle and echo cast a long shadow, even though they put the project on hold after three short years. Without Porter Ricks, it’s hard to imagine Pole, Shackleton, Burial, or any number of artists working in the most densely crosshatched corners of electronic music. Their last album was 1999’s Symbiotics, a split LP with Techno Animal (the industrial duo of Kevin Martin, later known as the Bug, and Justin K. Broadrick, a veteran of a host of bands like Napalm Death, Godflesh, and Ice) on which their gravelly sound came to resemble something alive and malevolent, their synths’ jagged waveforms glinting like the teeth of a snarling animal.

On their first new work in 17 years, not much has outwardly changed—and really, that’s the best possible scenario. When they called it quits, they were still in the process of pushing their sound forward, so for them to pick up where they left off is a welcome development. Shadow Boat consists of just three tracks, but they cover a considerable amount of ground. “Harbour Chart” creeps ahead at 60 beats per minute, faint kick and hi-hat all but subsumed in a maelstrom of foghorns and static. “Bay Rouge” is faster, a brisk andante of glancing chords and metallic textures. The timing of the release couldn't be more perfect, given the way the track's movements mimic kicking up piles of dry autumn leaves; the whole thing is crisp, chilly, and brooding. “Shadow Boat” is the longest, quickest, and most intense of the bunch, a headlong tumble into a wind-tunnel rave, its synths rattling like a broken screen.

Porter Ricks always excelled at sketching out sweeping, subaquatic expanses—ironically, their name comes from a character on the 1960s television series Flipper, a children’s show about a dolphin, even though there’s nothing cuddly about their music—and that continues to be the case here; the sense of space suggested by all three tracks is immense, practically unbounded. For years, most dub techno records have concerned themselves with nothing more than dub techno itself, but Shadow Boat tackles bigger ideas: Its main subject is the interplay of uncontrollable forces. All three tracks, balancing four-to-the-floor beats with unpredictable explosions of sandblasted tone, explore the tension between steadiness and turmoil. On the one hand, the certainty of timekeeping; on the other, things ripped loose from their fixtures. (“Shadow Boat” would have made a great soundtrack to Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, playing the regularity of the spacecraft’s orbit against its spectacularly violent pulverization.) Ultimately, it’s not about chaos, exactly, but something like it: unpredictable, dubwise chain reactions that leave us cowed and awestruck—patterns whose complexity we can scarcely begin to apprehend.