House Is A Feeling

The older you get, the more there is to look back on, and the more there is to forget.

And of course, the older you get, the more cynical you become. A friend’s older brother once quipped every “night out” makes a dance music fan more cynical, their field of vision narrower, until eventually they just like one four word genre. It was like a gypsy’s curse. The fact that it was delivered on some random Sunday night in summer at about 5am tells me how long ago it was, how little I probably believed it then.

I still don’t think it has to be that way. But sometimes looking back at years spent listening to dance music. It’s like surveying a smoking battlefield, it’s hard to tell where there were triumphs and where there were only wastes of time, or whether it was all a waste of time. I look back at the last 8 years or so (some of you may look back even longer) and often wonder what I got from it all, or what united all that time. What’s the end result of all those minutes and hours turned into days and nights consuming this odd functional music voraciously?

Ultimately it is a tiredness of sorts, if not a cynicism. All the records and parties and sounds are your own journey, and eventually you feel like you’ve travelled it. It’s a mental weariness, a sort of stoic mechanical feeling. What’s interesting is that techno itself seems to give birth to sounds that match this feeling, to vague suggestive records that are less “for those who know” than “for those who don’t know anymore”.

Shed’s “Shedding The Past” brims with these feelings. It’s the dead eyed sonic shards of a life lived in techno, the story of somebody else’s path, their journey through countless scenes and sounds, years and days. It’s at times ambient, at times anonymous, almost always ambiguous, brimming with the paradoxically nihilistic identity that says feeling nothing can still be the most powerful feeling of all.

From the opening intro drones to the cold techno of “Another Wedged Chicken”, and the rough mechanics of “Flat Axe”, this is a record which makes that inhumanity you’ve been feeling feel more human. “The Lower Upside Down” is a rope ladder from reality to a dazed dreamworld, before “Archived Document” makes you feel that sense of subcultural belonging once again, with a set of zpoken affirmations rhymed off that seem to roll back the years once again, to make you feel you’ve been here before, you’ve never left. “That Beats Everything” shatters the crystal ball, the only typical Ostgut-Ton moment on the entire record.

After that, it’s stepping back into space again with “Ithaw”, a sort of Berghain dubstep which pulses mournfully, a record that seems a paean to tiredness, to the burn out at the end of the day or night. Then just when it seems the towel has been thrown in, “Estrangé” explodes. The penultimate track on the record is the sound of dusting yourself off, of emerging soaked in sweat and shattered after all those years, all those records, all those parties, all that information, and finding the path once again.

It’s a call to arms, a slice of steely euphoria that makes electronic music seem like as bold a badge of identity as ever. You hear this and you know you can doggedly resist the end of the night, and stave off the end of it all.