The speaker creatures running the show at Slug Wife have a way of one-upping themselves on a fairly constant basis. Sound design is the name of their game, and their roster carries some of the progenitor producers and engineers involved with contemporary bass music. Alongside Seppa and Kursa, Broken Note is one of the original Slugs to carry the mantle, placing him directly in the center of low-end design’s Gastropoda enterprise. After spending the last year deep at work in his laboratory, he’s crafted what is undoubtedly his most ambitious release to date: Exit The Void.
Exit The Void is a 15-track album brimming with distorted textures and hair-splitting rhythmic switch-ups. Broken Note’s music is exactly as his name suggests; staccato, abrupt, and unabashedly glitchy. Over the course of a tenured career that spans more than a decade, he’s been at the forefront of modern bass design since his inception, driving the burgeoning sounds of neuro and half-time drum’n’bass since their infancy. What has always set him characteristically apart from his contemporaries is the extremely punk veneer and aesthetic to his music. Exit The Void expands the horizons of that attitude. His mixes are certifiably clean by all measures, but the music itself is a blanket of distortion and intentional phasing. Clipped, dented, and fractured bits of audio are his weapons of choice, and he wields them with remarkable dexterity. Whether it’s speaker-shredding low-end in “Pressure Chamber”, or the intentionally malfunctioning breaks in “Iron Sky” or “Parabolic Hex”, his music channels through the ears like a data stream fighting its way to sentience. It’s an ultimately successful fight, giving Exit The Void the illusion of biological growth.
Broken Note is often the quieter of his slug compatriots, but never for lack of ambition. His head-down work habits have paid off time and again in the form of mentally-scintillating music and performances, especially throughout the stateside Slug Wife takeover earlier this year. Pushing the boundaries of sound and pressure wherever and however he can, Broken Note has never failed to deliver on his evolving ferocity. This time around, he’s managed to completely break those boundaries altogether, bending the frequency spectrum into a fantastically spectral adventure. For all those seeking the dark, undulant bits within bass music, your next fix is waiting inside the folds of Exit The Void.
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