Fireworks | Undeadman

Making a splash in the mid-2000s London Dubstep scene, even Sam Shackleton's earliest tracks established the unique psychedelic tribal style of a man operating on his own wavelength. While the impressive amount of detail in his signature percussion style might not always lend itself to the dance floor, Shackleton has always backed it up with impressive bass weight, à la contemporaries Skream and Digital Mystikz. His high-minded low-end journey began though, with the founding of the Skull Disco label with partner Appleblim. Both quickly became legends, but their paths soon diverted, Appleblim becoming well-established with his own label, Apple Pips, while Shackleton's cosmic trajectory has taken him entirely past Dubstep and on to Berlin, where he has released on Perlon and London's Fabric, with many remixes on other Techno labels. Just recently he dropped his first release on his new imprint, Woe to the Septic Heart.

Fireworks is a four-track release with two originals and two re-rubs keeping with the overall spirit of the package. The title track opens the ceremony, and it finds Shackleton at his most-outward bound, with the walls of sub-bass barely holding him to earth while alien psychedelic synthesizers make their expected extraterrestrial visits. Halfway through, a tribal beat awash in a sea of reverb and outer-space organ make a rude intrusion, with Techno hats adding extra power to the rocket-fueled trip. Returning briefly from retirement, Torsten Profrock's T++ alias does remix duties here, shattering Shackleton's single-minded vision into a cubist reformation of impossibly broken rhythms centered around a black hole of pulsating delay. Making a return from the nether lands, "Undeadman" comes next and holds down the spacier end of the producer's spectrum with heavy dub-style bass and melodic percussion grooves alongside a swung hat pattern and pitched-down vocals from beyond the grave. Longtime collaborators Mordant Music do the revision here, and they turn in a 10-minute opus that takes the original into ambient territory. Although a half-step beat comes in after a few minutes, the washes of heavy acid-fueled brain damage keep this firmly in downtempo territory, with lysergic afterburners on full throttle.