Dave Wesley: Fourth Wall
Arctic Dub

VA: Arctic Dub v5
Arctic Dub

Don't let the name fool you: not everything Arctic Dub issues is dub and dub only. As these recent sets show, it is central to the label identity, but the ground covered extends beyond a single style. Compiled by Gabi von Dub and Dave Wesley, the label's fifth compilation features ambient, techno, and dub-related tracks produced by practitioners from Croatia, Portugal, Germany, North America, and the UK, while Wesley steps out with a collection that's as expansive and wide-ranging as the comp.

Consistent with a project apparently based on “subconscious peripheral sonic imagery,” Fourth Wall provides a seriously heady listen, Wesley happy to let his creativity take him down the wildest of experimental paths. True to the Arctic Dub style, the recording features blurry dub-techno beats drenched in cavernous, industrial-ambient atmospherics, yet Wesley individuates the thirteen pieces, too. In “Bridging Shot,” for example, electric guitar shadings nudge the material into a slightly different zone, whereas “Axis of Action” overlays its lurching convulsions with voices, one of them Christian Bale's, his infamous film-set diatribe plundered for the arrangement.

The thick fog rolls in quickly, with “Diegesis” wedding a cryptic, electronically distorted voice to outdoors field recordings and a prototypical Basic Channel-styled pulse. In other tracks, the presentation is sometimes so dense, it can be difficult to identify the instruments used in the production. When the towering ambient colossus “Lap Dissolve” and glitch-laden meditation “Undercranking” burrow into the psyche, perhaps the best strategy is to turn the volume up and allow yourself to be engulfed by Wesley's billowing constructions.

There are moments when you might find yourself reminded of another artist: early Vladislav Delay (circa Entain and Multila) during “Fill Light,” for instance, and Terre Thaemlitz during “Continuity Cut,” the latter particularly arresting due to an arrangement where rippling ambient-industrial textures and needling electronic punctuations merge with male (presented backwards, if I'm not mistaken) and female speaking voices. And though a production such as “Ellipsis” is cut straight from the Basic Channel-Chain Reaction cloth, it's no less satisfying for doing so, Wesley showing himself an expert at sculpting an oceanic exercise in skanking dub-techno.

The label's fifth compilation makes for a natural complement to Fourth Wall, especially when a track by Wesley's one of the fourteen presented. Like his, the collection ranges widely, ambient dub-techno accounted for, of course, but other styles pursued, too. At almost 100 minutes, the comp's also well-stuffed (six tracks exceed eight minutes apiece, one reason why it's as long as it is) and as such is perhaps better consumed in either smaller cumulative amounts or as a soundtrack to other activities. Truth be told, some tracks wouldn't suffer from judicious editing; astatine's “atomic number 85,” for instance, flirts quite pleasingly with minimal, downtempo techno but would do so as effectively for five rather than eight minutes.

A number of cuts opt for atmosphere over aggression, with Solar Debris' contribution, “It's All Dark When You Are Gone,” impressing for the elegance of its luscious textures and seductive flow, and Angular Momentum and Existente opting for allusive soundscaping in “All Thoughts” and “Lyrica,” respectively. Slow tempos are also favoured by some, a case in point Positive Centre, whose “Longyearbyen” lays out a lulling, entrancing skank for nearly nine minutes. On the more experimental tip we have The Mayhem Lecture Series' “Conscious Pilots,” which couples congas, of all things, with electronic noises and voice transmissions.

May 2019