Ikonika: synth conductor

Planet Mu’s recent exemplary form continues with a release from Hyperdub synth conductor Ikonika.

I always imagine Ikonika’s music as a soundtrack to one of Phillip K Dick’s tales detailing future-now, social-psychotropic collapses; a paranoid / schizoid take on the real.  And these Planet Mu tracks Smuck and We Could Be Ikons are just that.

Ikonika’s melodies always sit at odds with their wooziness; they are encompassing and comforting, groove driven and seductive. A particular funk and groove dominates and places her music in a category of its own.  Referring to dubstep or wonky would be great disservice to the sound Ikonika creates. It’s entirely its own entity.

Ikonika’s tracks are more orchestrated than simply ‘produced’. It’s as if Ikonika had an army of sentient synthesizers at her disposable and lauds over them with an oversized solar powered baton.  The sun feeding in and zooping up the florescent effervescence whilst she maintains total control and maintains a totalitarian vision of what the synthborgs should, and should not be doing.

Smuck, on the A side, is a particularly great example of this.  The name alone implies something highly unsanitary, and the track is dirty.  It’s a highly disciplined orgy of synthetic funk.  It’s like a rummage down the pants of the synthesizer you lust after, without even knowing its name.  You have to submit to the wooze of layered synths and beats that are so well placed they aren’t. So deliberately badly placed they couldn’t be more perfect.  It’s total.

Smuck, it turns out (according to Urban Dictionary) is the Hebrew word for pre-circumcised penis flesh.  Therefore i’m not sure how apt it is to call this track tasty.  But it’s certainly something you want to irrefutably gobble down with the knowledge it might not be the best thing for you to consume.

Scandinavian phenomenon and sadly something of a ‘dish du hier’, Skweee, is the point of inspiration for the flipside track We Could Be Ikons.  It’s a reversion of Eero Johannes’ ‘We Could be Skweeeroes’ from the Harmönia compilation ‘Skandinavian Skweee Volume 2’.  A fitting remix as Ikonika’s tracks all have the component ingredients of the idiosyncratic Skweee smorgasbord, but her take drops the P-funk referencing bass slap of Johaannes’ original and replaces it with a k-funk bounce, simultaneously injecting a certifiably UK Garage swing and the pads help lift track on to a new plain.

This release is disco waltzer music for the deprived.  Skwreeeam if you want to go faster. It’s the plink plonk synth flex of someone who has had their cerebellum ruptured and set lose in the synth asylum. It’s a beauteous simultaneous attack on, and a gift to your pleasure centres.

Ikonika ZIQ254 is released on Planet Mu 26 October 2009.