Peder Mannerfelt - Equality Now EP

Pitchfork 71

No subliminal messaging for Peder Mannerfelt: on Equality Now, he wears his politics on his record sleeve. Hailing from Stockholm, Mannerfelt is a skillful engineer and a tireless collaborator. As well as his solo production work, he performs as one half of analog synth duo Roll the Dice, has produced records for Blonde Redhead and Glasser under the name the Subliminal Kid, and played an integral role in Karin Dreijer Andersson’s Fever Ray. He shares a few common interests with Andersson—emancipatory politics, exotic rhythms, and Brothers Grimm dress-up. Playing live, he wears a waist-length wig that obscures his face, making him look like a sort of techno Rapunzel.

The Equality Now EP marks Mannerfelt’s first output on Numbers, the Glasgow dance imprint that discovered Rustie and SOPHIE, among others. Its three tracks explore three quite different directions, while holding to a few base tenets: clever ideas, executed simply, with a minimum of gloss or clutter. The title track is crisp, propulsive techno produced with such economy that you probably couldn’t excise a single aspect without the whole thing disintegrating. Arid drums lock into a manic bounce, synth lines bend and flex into strange timbres and two synthetic voices—one male, one female—intone the world “equality”, mostly in unison, sometimes a tantalizing half-beat out of of step. Its repetition recalls a chant or a march: grassroots activism tailored for the dancefloor.

While at first glance Equality Now’s productions can appear fairly simplistic, they often conceal ingenious elements. “Breaking Patterns,” the EP’s second track, is a borderline-crude acid number that contains rhythmic echoes of Mannerfelt’s 2015 LP The Swedish Congo Record—a sonic “research project” which attempted to fastidiously recreate 1930s field recordings of tribal music in the Belgian Congo using modern tools. Taut hand drums pound ceaselessly, as synthesizers spit out electronic zaps and distressed strings crawl mournfully across the frame. But most of the action happens on a microscopic level: beats form themselves into unusual polyrhythms that morph and reshape, while small twists of FX or a shifting mix suddenly jolt the track onto a new footing.

Equality Now bows out with “Rules, Ropes & Strings,” an ambient piece that pares back the beats and ushers in slow tidal washes of shimmering texture. It’s a strangely sedate end for a record that is elsewhere out to enthuse or provoke. Hardly unusual for a figure as mercurial as Mannerfelt, though. This is music guided by impulse, not premeditation; music in which an idea is good, right up until the moment that it’s spent.