PERC: ‘A New Brutality’ EP Out Today. What The Quietus say about this EP..

Much has been made of Ali ‘Perc’ Wells’ status as descendant of the likes of Throbbing Gristle’s Chris Carter or Einsturzende Neubauten – techno practitioners as animators of the body industrial. But there’s another, far less vogueish, reference point that crops up again and again throughout his work: near-sickeningly intense, grime-ridden, squat party acid techno. You know the sort – the kind of pummeling, high-bpm tracks that inspire dancers to compete over who can keep themselves awake the longest (“Stay up forever”), or who can ingest the greatest quantity of machine strength face-loosener in the shortest amount of the time.

Look over there! On the dancefloor, a skinny girl with dreads as thick as cable car wires is flailing around with sufficient gusto to turn her into a human cat o’ nine tails. In the corner, a bloodshot-eyed bloke in a slogan t-shirt is mumbling about smashing the system while simultaneously rolling a joint and asking a friend to hold a card up to his nose. And the soundsystem front centre, peaking as someone pushes to squeeze out a little more volume, is blasting out Perc’s ‘A New Brutality’, its interweaving layers of metal-plated percussion and infernal sub-bass rumble sending a few dancers – barely in control of their own faculties by now – into spasms as they try to keep up. The whole scene is something straight out of a parent’s nightmare, or an anti-drug propaganda campaign, but in fact the mood is disarmingly benign given the music’s savage combination of speed and abrasion. It sets nervous systems ablaze, but in pushing beyond the body’s capacity to keep time with its constant, high-pressure assault, it hits the body as a curiously immersive blur of noise. Dancers are kneaded into soft and malleable shapes, becoming playful elements bounding seamlessly from place to place and person to person, all night long.

As resident of the Home Counties, Wells’ music taps into that legacy – of outdoor raves and free parties in abandoned buildings – that haunts the regions immediately orbiting the M25. His debut album Wicker & Steel, with its muffled kicks and suffocating background ambience, was frequently reminiscent of hearing a rave from the outside, its thick pulse rumbling through the ground in a kilometre-wide radius around the epicentre. Rather than being directly a dancefloor-aimed album – though certainly there was no shortage of body-battering material on display – its overall mood was coloured by that feeling of remove. The presence of Sleeper’s Louise Wener delivering a monologue at the album’s opening, as well as the sparse, sprawling environment mapped by tracks like ‘My Head Is Slowly Exploding’, spoke as much of a general sense of suburban dislocation and frustration.

This EP follow-up, aptly titled A New Brutality, however, legs it straight out of its battered old Ford estate into the heart of the warehouse, making explicit Wells’ connection to a techno subculture that runs at a slight remove from both the industrial lineage (Regis, Surgeon et al) and the Berghain’s sexualised house-tempo throb. It’s these concerns which make Wells’ music unique, in a world where TG-loving techno boffins are ten-a-penny. Techno is always concerned with matters of the body – with music so intensely focused on physical engagement and domination, how could it not be? – but where Surgeon expressed TG’s heightened sexuality through an interest in balance and pleasure/pain thresholds (his label is tellingly named Dynamic Tension), and where Sandwell District’s ostensibly stern tracks are near pillow-soft, caressing dancers even as they’re forced into submission, Perc’s tracks aren’t necessarily as explicit in their sensuality .. Read the rest on The Quietus