It’s not uncommon to suggest that we live in a post-genre musical era – but all too rarely does the discussion then move on to how we might find alternative coordinates to collectively describe sounds. If you did want to do that, though, you could do worse than take lessons from club music. For a long time before the streaming era sent everything off in every direction, DJ-led culture was adept at finding patterns in flux. The best known example is the “Balearic” aesthetic – originally music played by DJs in Ibiza and other Mediterranean party zones in the 1980s – which was completely unbound by tempo, instrumentation or origin, but was the ultimate in “you know it when you hear it”.
The same goes for a particular strand of underground electronica that formed through the mid-1990s and remained fertile thereafter. It grew in reaction to the formularisation of house, techno, drum’n’bass etc into overly slick and predictable forms, absorbed aspects of grime and dubstep as they emerged in the 2000s, rejected experimentalism for its own sake unless it was in pursuit of a groove, and never really had a name. However, if you told a lover of techno or dubstep or even ambient that something had a “warehouse” sound – implying it was something to be played in an illegal or makeshift venue – they’d very likely grasp that it was a bit that way inclined. Anyway, it’s in that zone that Copenhagen producer Anastasia Kristensen dwells.
This is a generalist website, so maybe in one sense there’s no point offering reference points like Edinburgh techno misfit Neil Landstrumm, or cosmic San Francisco explorer Jonah “Spacetime Continuum” Sharp, or the Haywire parties where Andrew Weatherall and Keith Tenniswood’s Two Lone Swordsmen made the weirdest “machine funk” into total hedonism, or the clonky post-dubstep house of Boddika or Julio Bashmore. But in another, just to know that Kristensen’s music exists in a very specific continuum may well help you anchor it as you listen. Of course, if you’ve never experienced bass going right through your body in a packed and sweaty cellar with constant music and disorienting lighting, it may make no sense at all. This terse (nine tracks in 34 minutes), funky little album really is rooted in bodies moving beyond all else. But even if not a raver, if you’re funny-noises-curious in any way, it’s well worth giving up your attention to – and maybe you’ll even start to discern some of its deep and broad roots.
Listen to "Secretary Bird":
