Rian Treanor - File under UK metaplasm

After the success of Rian Treanor's first album "ATAXIA" last year, we are very excited to announce his follow-up, the less than sedate "File Under UK Metaplasm" coming out in October.

Inspired by Tanzania's 'singeli' sound and with all its tracks at a breakneck 180bpm, "File Under UK Metaplasm" is an altogether more energetic and full-throttle experience than his debut.

In 2018, Treanor left his home of Rotherham, a working class town in the North of England not far from rave nexus Sheffield, and headed to Uganda. He’d been invited to perform at Nyege Nyege festival, a mythical event that takes place on the shores of Lake Victoria in Jinja once a year. After nearly a week of almost non-stop syncopated bass, Treanor drove to the country’s capital city Kampala to produce music for a month at the Nyege Nyege’s Boutique Studio – an incubator that serves as a central hub for the record label and its many harmonic ventures.

A week later, while he was performing at Hollywood, the tiny dive bar that housed the Nyege Nyege crew’s first events, Treanor began to think differently about the sound he’d been developing since 2015’s acclaimed “A Rational Tangle”. “Everyone was still beaming after the festival, full of energy and wanting it raw and fast,” he explains. Treanor had been collaborating with Acholi fiddle player Ocen James, and absorbing sounds from the other producers at the studio like Tanzania’s Jay Mitta and Sisso and Glasgow experimental duo The Modern Institute. The result was a jerky blend of hybridized footwork and singeli (Tanzania’s own lightning-fast dance sound) that clocked in at a rapid 200bpm. “I played a Jlin track at the wrong speed and it was about 225bpm,” he admits. “But it sounded really good so I went with it. People were going mental, it was so much fun.”

Arriving home, inspired by the singeli production process, he focused on energy, building tracks and exploring urgency as the guiding method. Over the course of the year Treanor refined these ideas, building from raw components and eventually focusing on engineering the physicality of the sound. And at the end of 2019 he had the opportunity to tour Japan, where he was able to work out the finishing touches performing on some of the world’s best soundsystems.

This polarity – the enigmatic, sweaty energy of singeli juxtaposed with slick, high-def bass weight – sits at the centre of “File Under UK Metaplasm”, Treanor’s second full-length. Opening track ‘Hypnic Jerks’ is maybe the perfect example of this, with crinkled percussive loops cut through by machine-gun kicks and acidic wobbles. Elsewhere, ‘Vacuum Angle’ takes Sheffield’s Warp-ed legacy and brings it crashing into the future, with rhythms collapsing into static and noise but never deconstructing or losing the flow. ‘Debouncing’ meanwhile folds gliding square synths into rattling dancehall kicks, joining the dots between SND, Equiknoxx, Wiley and MCZO & Duke with a neon Sharpie.

“It’s using all those formulaic dance structures but just slightly mangled or messed up,” he says. “I’m still focused on making functioning dance music for clubs, but I’m really interested in how far you push that before it’s just like – no.”

"File Under UK Metaplasm" is out on October 2nd on Flourescent yellow vinyl, CD and digital formats.

instabuy

Fuck yes!

So good, been waiting for his next album.

File under fucking lush m8

So hyped for this one, love that first track and this machine gun kick !

muchos exite! instabuy

  On 8/5/2020 at 1:39 PM, d-a-m-o said:

So hyped for this one, love that first track and this machine gun kick !

Sounds a bit like Metallica. 

An African field recording cassette being played with the old hack of pressing the fast forward and play button at the same time so far. It sounds like I'm shit talking but there may be something here. 

white man stealing the african people's labor once again

Nice track

  On 9/3/2020 at 2:34 PM, andrd said:

 

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dope track,  can't wait for the full LP !

  On 8/17/2020 at 1:13 PM, KovalainenFanBoy said:

white man stealing the african people's labor once again

There's a large gray area between "inspiration" and "theft".

And this is definitely somewhere in that area. 

First track is almost exactly like one of those hyper fast south eastern African things, just with bland sounds. Second track, on the other hand, is pretty neat. Definitely more on the "inspired by" side of things.

  On 9/3/2020 at 6:17 PM, rhmilo said:

There's a large gray area between "inspiration" and "theft".

And this is definitely somewhere in that area. 

First track is almost exactly like one of those hyper fast south eastern African things, just with bland sounds. Second track, on the other hand, is pretty neat. Definitely more on the "inspired by" side of things.

'hyper fast south eastern African things' sounds pretty dismissive

The write up explains it fairly well I thought

  On 9/3/2020 at 6:47 PM, andrd said:

'hyper fast south eastern African things' sounds pretty dismissive

What do you mean? There's a number of different styles of music that are all from the south east of Africa, like from the border between Moçambique and South Africa and upwards, to, in this case, Tanzania that all have these crazy fast drumming patterns. Since Shangaan Electro enough of them have made it to the West that it's kind of a known thing that there's, well, hyper fast south eastern African music.  There's large differences between them, of course, but one thing they all have in common is that they're, well, fast.

really love the 3 first tracks, dis gonna be good !

 Rian Treanor - Closed Curve at ~32mins 

the whole show is great though, should listen to it all imo

Although I have some reservations about this as per KovalainenFanBoy and rhmilo's comments, I think I might order this after enjoying the bits I've heard. But I'd be sooner to buy some hard copies of some digital singeli music if I could, but alas that seems to be mostly on very limited cassettes as well as vinyl I don't have a record player/not getting one.

now you can check it out