kuedo: assertion of a surrounding presence

Electronic music pioneer Jamie Teasdale, best known as Kuedo, makes a timely and luminous return with the sci-fi-designed Assertion of a Surrounding Presence, his first solo release proper since 2012, and the second issue on his fledgling Knives label after J.G. Biberkopf's Ecologies. In 2015, a decade on from the groundbreaking sound engineering and designs of Teasdale's pivotal role in Vex'd, and five years since he emerged solo as Kuedo, his celebrated production style remains anterior to modern dance music and electronica, largely by virtue of unbending futurist focus and careful attention to detail. Here flanked by collaborations with erstwhile Vex'd partner Roly Porter plus Berlin's Phoebe Kiddo aka Mind:Body:Fitness and Canada's Egyptrixx, the next chapter in Kuedo's odyssey expands his sci-fi dimensions with ever-sharper contouring, gradients, and hyperreal specialization structured around recalibrated footwork, drill, and techno engines. Scaling from the vertigo-inducing opener to a finale of panicked gamelan drama, Assertion of a Surrounding Presence renders Kuedo's most affective, elaborate reflection of a nowness, divining a metaphysical, cybernetic zeitgeist in the vaulted reverb structures of his Ghost in the Shell nod "Eyeless Angel Intervention" or the trance fluid T-2000 tekstep momentum of "Boundary Regulation," while pursuing more tangled emotions and ethereal sensations in the recursive, hyaline gamelan cadence of "Border State Collapse" and "Event Tracking Across Populated Terrain." This follows right thru to the artwork by Melbourne, Australia-based Joshua Petherwick, who perfectly connotes the album's aesthetic and concept with a nod to sci writer Anthony Burgess's fictional conceit of Nadsat -- a cryptic systemization of order in a dystopian environment -- in his abstract yet acutely evocative geometries. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton. Artwork by Joshua Petherwick. RIYL Kenji Kawai, late '90s tech-step, Chicago footwork, and drill.