Quilsk - Artificial Imaginations

Fred Mikardo-Greaves on the Norman Records site says:

"Electronic music has long been the arena of the mysterion. Indeed, if you were to create the platonic ideal of an electronic musician, it would be an anonymous figure hiding their real name behind a moniker - a trope parodied, famously, by Aphex Twin in his 90s heyday. Enigmas rule here, and even with the coming of the Information Age we are still inundated with music-makers who let their machines do the talking.

The latest artist to emerge in this long and distinguished lineage is Quilsk. Besides the fact that they hail from Bristol, we’ve got nothing on Quilsk or their debut LP ‘Artificial Imaginations’. This air of mystery works in this record’s favour, cloaking an already curious album in further layers of intrigue.

‘Artificial Imaginations’ is one of those obtuse electronics-based records that evokes a very specific feeling in the listener. It’s not ominous, exactly, but there is a terseness to this thing that slyly reels you in, making you press your ear up close to the speaker to see if you can decipher any meaning from Quilsk’s oblique signals.

This same thread runs through the work of everyone from Madteo to Oberman Knocks to golden-age Metalheadz, though stylistically ‘Artificial Imaginations’ isn’t particularly similar to any of them. A few of the tracks here have the same scrunched-up sonics one finds in Oval and Autechre, but neither of those acts exhibit Quilsk’s streetwise approach to bassweight - the low-ends are where Quilsk's jungle, dub and hip-hop influences are most easily parsed.

The record that comes to mind most when listening to ‘Artificial Imaginations’ is Actress’ ‘Ghettoville’, a set of hauntological anti-techno that threw together Burial’s crackling ‘Untrue’ with the grizzled entrails of 90s electronica and chopped ‘n’ screwed hip-hop. ‘Artificial Imaginations’ is not as grey-scale as ‘Ghettoville’, and tracks like ‘Medina Cortex’ yoke together their beats in a more coherent manner, but a sense of unsteady drift is shared. And like ‘Ghettoville’, while this record might catch you cold, it might also have you hooked.

This album is dedicated to Harry Fulcher [R.I.P]