Gross Motor: Same Shit, Different Day

Gross Motor: Same Shit, Different Day

(Bandcamp)

Out Now

DL

Business as per from Norwich-based, drum and bass-dismantling editorial cyber-gladiator Gross Motor who, on his second album, Same Shit, Different Day, delivers the illusion of chaos via his mischievous proclivity to distort time as we know it. Review and Interview by Ryan Walker.

Chaos is an instrument. A serpent made of spare parts. Warping space-time with every lash of its writhing body. Captured. Trained. Tamed into fulfilling his every whimsical deed. For although Gross Motor appears to be the work of an obsessive madman occasionally unleashing a feral experiment from its cage in the basement of a secret laboratory, there are parameters and an astonishing system of skills to consider here, too.
AAWhen conveying what Gross Motor does, there are no words – only shape; a manipulated deformation of it. The apparition of space sucks us through its false floors, flinging us up again as an orca would toss a seal midair just for kicks. Shape reigns supreme. Sworn to anonymity to increase the distance between his current artistic output and the past, (all we know is – he’s a he), Same Shit, Different Day is continuation of where the debut left off.
AA”Yes. I started work on the new album as I was getting the first one ready for release, sorting out mastering and doing promotion,” he explains. ”I’m always coming up with new ideas for tracks – whenever I have a spare 5 – 10 minutes with my laptop to hand, I’ll knock something up! When I’ve got a few solid ideas, I choose the best ones and develop them slowly over the course of weeks or months.”

Offering a hijacked, spangled exploration of what dance music can be presented as when its rhythmic gearwheels and sense-fusing textures are pushed against the edges of our skull, soon after climaxing to seizure-inducing limits as a way to animate us into a spell of hyperarousal; Same Shit, Different Day is the work of techniques tried and tested, ready to be deployed in the name of nothing except action.
AA”As with the first album, I’m working with dance music sounds and tropes, but with a focus on complex drum programming and rhythmic experimentation,” he says. ”I tend towards quite busy textures, high density of information, and the tracks are generally quite structurally compressed. But whereas the first album was about establishing a method of working, this time, I had already developed a set of techniques, so it came together pretty quickly.”

With those set of techniques now refined to confidently throw us into a shapeshifting climbing frame with one arm tied behind our backs; techniques grinning as they toss us onward a complex of fragmented landscape, all zigzagging seesaws and monkey bars that elongate and melt as we swing from one bar to the other or booting us off the ledge into some interdimensional terrain occupied by a giddy Gross Motor- Same Shit, Different Day is a demonstrable flex of what those techniques can do. All we have to do is let the trip take us where it pleases.
AABut maybe only Gross Motor knows how to occupy this space. It’s dance music, and therefore invites us to engage with its tribal invocations, but with thanks to the self-reconfiguring combination of thermokinetic rhythms and spectral run of textures, a tightly-sprung bleed of serrated edges of colour and intoxicating hues saturating where any sign of space is available, only to be squashed out of the settlement moments later by something more stubborn than it can confront; the species of dance music Gross Motor commands is of an emphatically more divergent physicality; a cerebrally-stupefying endurance test, more than deserving to receive a block of therapy sessions afterwards once completed.
AA”Most tracks begin life as a randomised rhythmic pattern. Then I try out different drum kits and tempos until something interesting jumps out,” he explains. ”Once I’ve got a seed of an idea, I chuck sounds and layers on top, totally intuitively, and finally I bounce everything to audio and edit it and edit it until I think it’s done.”

The title track is a mind-fuck of delicately dialled in diamond cutter snares, bouncing against the walls of the program that made them as though a squash ball penetrating the panels that outline the sides of a warehouse rave, smothered in a thick smog. Sound effects as sharp as speartips are blunted, synths are bent, machines are boiled, caramel textures crackling against the sting of crystal rhythms dissolve into a comedown of soothing ethereality. Just as lethal, the sporadic Perfect Paul narrated Graph Goes Up is a heady geometric mushrooming of densely layered sputters and irritating machine glitches. Soon after, as though ignorant of gravity, but enjoying its time buoyantly abusing its flexible trampolines, Ground Grid arrives fully-loaded with enough lysergic surprises (dub flutters, unspooling sirens and dizzying pans, muscular-jungle jumps and sass-packed electro snarl) fierce enough slice through a traffic jam quicker than batting away a moth from a laptop screen.

AA”I like the idea of working with a more fluid, flexible grid as a ground. But also, there’s just so much music in 4/4. It’s like it has become a cultural default setting or something, maybe due in part to the rise of sequencers over the last 40 years or so. But just because a DAW loads up in 4/4 doesn’t mean you have to stick with that.”

Grids. Graphs. Plates. Maps. Bends about to snap apart in the presence of spacetime via a scattershot rhythm, or a gnawing beats burrowing routes around this labrynthine vortex, from the time-dilation tactics of Frame, a tesselated burst of hissing noise, chattering-teeth drums and blabbering electronics, to the woozy swagger of Travelate, all length-contraction dubplate pangs and Parkour-practicing percussive gulps clinging to the cliffs of a forbidden, fiberglass matrix; there’s a texture; a tactility, a stench of a chemical reaction between skin oils and the metal of a copper key contained within the palms radiating from Gross Motor’s work, as well as the tearing-apart of that tactility throughout the record’s mutated, manic piping.
AACongested one moment, then cleared the next, this sense of dismantling and rearranging what has only seconds before creates a rub of sonic paradoxes pulling on and pushing open any indication of sameness, defining one spot for too long. A single track includes a swirling multiplex of various layers, sometimes interconnected, other times, at odds with each other. A throbbing bass, a cavernous pad, a machine oozing gloop from its dark orifice, the tracks compose themselves, then deliberately combust, contrary to what agreements of shape or structure have been loosely agreed upon; a thick enmeshment that comes to Gross Motor easier as reciting A, B, C or giving Ableton an aneurysm.
AA”I’m just making music that I want to hear, that comes naturally to me. I have been producing dance music and composing experimental classical music for years, so I just took what I like about both and kind of mashed them together. The sounds, techniques, and rough and ready energy of dance music, with the rhythmic and formal freedom of more avant-garde or experimental music.’’

But to recite A, B, C in that order would be tediously trite. Possessing as much knowledge as Gross Motor does of the tropes of dance music, and a desire to assimilate its energetic rush but crammed with something more grotesque and frenetic, why not introduce a letter between the letter, the hidden A after the visible A? Mischievously slipping away between the teeth of the beats in a spill of nonsensical time signatures and impossible-to-repeat memories of metallic melodies, with so much going on, everywhere, all of the time, away from the tested methods that brought us the debut, an experiment as it happened- what is his general routine to making music generally?
AA”I find it’s best to work as quickly as possible, at least in the initial stages. I try to avoid thinking and just work freely and intuitively, letting ideas flow naturally and not questioning anything. I tend to come up with basic ideas very quickly, like 30 minutes or so to programme the main sounds and map out a basic structure. Later, I’ll listen back, and if it’s worth developing, then I get more systematic and critical. Of course,e a lot of the ideas I come up with are not interesting or just unusable, but working quickly gets those out fast so you can ‘get to the good stuff’.’’

This idea of ‘not thinking’ – yet by the same token, a borderline neuroticism when carving through the tracks strategically is conducive to the album’s agility and depth. This quickness is a way to capture the chaos. To control it. Think about chaos too much, and it consumes you. Jumping on a laptop when you have a spare minute is the best way to make it out alive, with the evidence of what has been harnessed, as relevant to that moment as possible. ‘’When I’m working on a track I ask myself: Is the overall energy level staying ‘taut’ throughout? Are there any details that jump out as ‘wrong’, in the context of the track? Is there anything in the track that I could make better? And I just keep working until the answers are yes, no and no!’’
AAOf course, it’s all chopped up afterwards, as though honing in deep into the entanglement of what has recently been designed, and the rough and ready aesthetic isn’t a sonic attachment so much as an aural conversation taking place, an eventually equilibrated dynamic of sounds tarnished and then having to deal with the fact they’re about to be twisted to pieces against the nauseating gleam of a computer’s tyrannical influence. ”I like distortion and grit and noise! I mean, on one level, it’s that simple, it’s just what I’m attracted to. I don’t tend to like music where all the dirt and mess has been ‘tidied up’,” he states. ”Although again, it’s similar to what I said above about early sample-based music. I like taking sounds that are raw, untidy and imprecise, and having them interact with the precision that the computer allows for, in terms of audio editing and microscopic rhythmic timing.”

Imbued with his history in jungle and drum and bass, the album boasts a mangled permutation of that iconoclastic, sample-based scene. Put through its paces; recalibrated to emphasise the tightly-shrinkwrapped ”tension between the rhythmic ‘imperfections’ of the sample and the total precision of the sequencer grid’’ that populates Gross Motor’s sound, this ‘imperfection’ is where the songs draw their power from; the panicky churn of the breezeblock-for-breakfast tempos of Live Stream, soon leading to synth-sprinkled cut-up of Same Shit, Different Day that ends the record encompass this imperfection. ”You hear this all the time in 90’s jungle where multiple sampled breakbeats are superimposed, and each has its own individual tempo fluctuations, etc, but these ‘imperfections’ can be repeated exactly by the sampler and are mapped onto a perfect rhythmic grid. And I like it when both aspects are audible, like when a breakbeat isn’t timed up properly so the loop restarts a fraction too early or too late, so the tempo of the break is slightly faster or slower than the tempo of the sequencer.”
AAAs a series of discrepancies between the sample itself and its placement within the context of a new piece of music, fantastically disjointed due to the sample carrying its uniquely copied flaw with it, a step or two out, or a step or two in; this stagger in the fabric of the tune, this stutter interrupting the expected chronology of the tune injects a wonderful sense of counterpoint emerges, an awkwardly compelling interplay full of vivacity and dirt.
AA”This is one of the core things that I’m trying to do – focusing on this idea and expanding it. I mean there are loads of things that I’ve taken from producing dance music, obvious stuff like sounds, but it’s these kinds of abstract principles that I find creatively productive and inspiring. I think if you’re using computers to make music, it’s worth considering the question of what it is that they make possible in musical terms. Like, what kinds of creative possibilities are only available with computers, and what are the implications of that?”

William’s Mix, a piece of music by John Cage from the collaborative Project for Music for Magnetic Tape, is a pioneering piece of electronic collage music using tape as the instrument. It was described by Alex Ross as having ‘the air of a world gone beserk’ and ‘modernity imploding on itself’. Although having not used tape hiss…yet, does Gross Motor see a similarity in how Cage’s work was published and his own?
AA”I love that piece, but Alex Ross’s description doesn’t resonate with me at all! I don’t hear Williams Mix as having ‘gone berserk’. It’s obviously quite a busy piece, but I find that the constant change and movement kind of flattens out quite quickly, and I become more aware of a very slow or static field underlying it,” he remarks. ”If anything, I find the openness of the music to be calming – there isn’t one ‘reading’ imposed on you, and it’s left to you to find your own way through the piece. One way I have very definitely been influenced by Cage, though, is by his method of setting up formal structural containers (durations), and filling them with randomly generated material”.

Still just as preoccupied with unloading a seemingly limitless artillery of malfunctioning machines, torrents of wired-up-wrong rhythmic skips and blended bundles of backwards noise as we cross its unsettled levels, but rather shimmy into view with the stealth of a shadow changing shape against the wall; the implications of that are Centre Point and Baleen Plates.
AAThe former boasts a slow chug of electric winds roaring through the skull of the country, signals zipping across overhead wires, soon joined by a haunted motor of bastardised axles rubbing together, creaking as the grit is detoxified from the whole meandering joyride. A similarly contorted, drug-fuelled, techno-dub glare follows in Baleen Plates, succumbing to the pressure and dragging the edges towards the centre, paralysed by its tantalising trapeze of spine-chilling synths in mid-carpark combat, braindance breakfeats and brutalist-building bending electronics echoing down one barren street and into the emptiness of another. We hear a voice, but see nothing.

Eating the essence of dance music, from drum and bass to jungle, inverted energies coursing through a city’s central processing unit in chrysalis, amid the transmitted broadcast, sent from tower blocks long listed, infested with ecstatic interruptions of nearby electrical devices cause the track to break apart completely- out of an inspection of what that dance music can do, the columns crack apart, the concave emerges, the structures collapse, it all explodes into something wholly new.

Same Shit, Different Day, for Gross Motor then.

~

Gross Motor | Bandcamp

Ryan Walker | Louder Than War