The Elder Gods

Description

Active in London’s electronic underground since the late 80s, Paul Hierophant has long worked in the space between techno, ambient, and dub, preferring atmosphere, tone, and slow-burn tension to obvious dancefloor tricks. The Elder Gods finds him further out on the fringes of electro, where the synths loom large and the delay and reverb units are given a proper workout. The result is widescreen, ominous, and immersive. The title track is a monolithic slab of rhythm where corroded synth pressure and ritualistic percussion feel less like a groove than some ancient machine grinding slowly back into life. Titans stalks forward on a cavernous half-step pulse, all foggy bass weight and fractured metallic vocal echos, like dub techno that has wandered into darker mythological territory and decided to stay there. The Hydra coils around a lurching low-end spine, its tentacular FX flickering and mutating while the groove stubbornly regenerates. Works and Days rounds things off with a standout alien vocal loop drifting through pulsing bass and drums, lending the track a meditative feel that works just as well for late-night headphone sessions as it does in the deeper end of a DJ set. This is an EP for selectors who like their electro expansive, slightly strange, and built for proper sound systems.