The Heart of Instinct - Stuart Chalmers


An Liebezeit laced exploration ‘The Heart of Instinct’ is caught in the moment, spires the repetitive to dig into some mighty fine concrète expansions.

Instinct 5 swims straight in there on the keeled tensives of ritualised percussion and volia rub…create serious transportatives that pull at your psyche. The prepared Swarmandal strings singing above them like some strange garnish as boundaries amorphically blur become abstracted and tilter volatile.

Loving the paganistic patter of Instinct 2 it’s scooping recoil reminiscent of the prosessional twilights of New Orders Lonely place, the glinting teeth of twangy accents and cymbal swell dramatically cut back to silence, then at the strike of a match exploding back into life. This new percussive direction is rather excellent, was half expecting a Moondog monologue to pop in and surprise me as the tracks serpentine undercurrents shimmer the sumptuous and this chiming chug milks the drama in reversing flows.

Stu’s usual dronic capstans are certainly taking a more subdued stance here, but do occasionally leak through and smear their subjects with eerie atmospheres and ghosty feedback fingers. The type that wash through Instinct 9’s gamelan-like spiderings are great, carpeting the tap-dancing whisks in a gleam of industrialisation.

Then Instinct 8 slows the pace, the only track here that doesn’t dance out on a solid drum fall but opts for a fragmentary focus full of elasticated trajectories and Limpe Fuchs like attentiveness. A swaying bias playing kinetic charades with investigative metallic, comical curls and duelling mice.

A textural swan-song that feeds nicely into the durgey rotary rub of Instinct 3 to dance a contracting echo chamber of percussives that domino a doppelgängering looptation of sawing texturals. The Congo-esque clatter of Instinct 4 too, squeezing new harmonics through it’s knotted verve , to leave the Japanese kyoto’s of Instinct 6 to tourniquet a trance gold of collapsing church bells - a celebratory cacophony that ends this offering perfectly.

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